The Mighty Spice Company

A couple of weeks ago, the nice people at The Mighty Spice Company sent me three of their chilled spice mixes to sample. Exciting stuff, this; I've not found anything similar to these fresh blends on sale in the UK. The Mighty Spice Company's offering is a really refreshing change from the oily, musty pastes and sauces you'll find on offer in the supermarket which taste vaguely of foreign - instead, these blends are made from fresh ingredients without fillers and additives (so they need to be kept refrigerated), and are really well-judged, with clean and subtle balances of flavour. They've been in development for two years, and you can really taste the effort that's gone into tweaking these mixtures to perfection.

Currently, the range includes a Szechwan mix, a Tandoori mix and a Thai Green mix. All three come with simple recipes on the side of the pack (recipes are also available on the Mighty Spice website), but the mixes are so flexible that you can (as, inevitably, I did - I'm very bad at following instructions) improvise around them very successfully. I was really chuffed to find that the mixes are comprehensive enough that I was able to make a positively fantastic stir-fry without having to add (and chop - hooray!) any ginger, garlic or other spices - and the balance of soy sauce and oyster sauce forming the background of the mix was spot on, so I didn't have to add any wet ingredients either. I made a lamb curry with the tandoori mix, some crushed tomatoes and coconut - especially good the next day, after a night in the fridge to let the flavours mingle, and again, it needed absolutely no additions to the very well-blended spice mix. The Thai mix was a bit milder than I would usually have chosen, but tasted green and fresh.

My favourite? Probably the Szechwan spice mix, which was loaded with Szechwan peppercorns. It's a good way into the spice for those of you who aren't familiar with it and its curious tongue-numbing (but not painful) heat, a sensation a little like a cross between a mint leaf and a chilli. In taste it's nothing like mint or chilli, but pleasantly citric. None of your syrupy, Chinese-sauce-inna-jar flavours here; this was a really bright, lively sauce that worked well with some chicken and sweet vegetables.

I'm sure it won't be long before you're able to find The Mighty Spice Company's products on sale in a supermarket chiller cabinet near you, but for now they're very new and are mostly available in London. You'll find the spice mixes stocked at Wholefoods Market, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and several organic grocers - a complete list of stockists is available here. I'd heartily recommend you spend the £3.99 on one of their mixes for a professional, easy and hopelessly tasty supper. Brilliant stuff - thanks, Mighty Spice guys!

Typhoon, Portland, OR

Remember Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas? Gourmet Magazine had heaped hyperbolic praise on it, and called it the USA's best Thai restaurant. We had a good, but not shockingly good meal there in December, but I left unconvinced that the continent lacked any Thai places better than this. What do you know - it's barely two months later, and I've found somewhere that beats it hollow.

We visited Typhoon's glossy, vampy Broadway branch at the Lucia hotel in Portland (tel. 503 224 8285). The Lucia is a very stylish boutique joint - all modern murals on the toilet doors, architectural flower arrangements, frosted glass, leather, lacquer and velvet. Typhoon's styling sits well here, and the restaurant was busy both nights we visited (be sure to book).

Service is tight and charming. We'd asked for a booth when booking our first meal at Typhoon, but arrived to find that the booth that had been earmarked for us was still full (writhingly so) of a couple who were maybe enjoying their meal a little too much. No problem for the hostess - she put us at what she and the waitress referred to as 'the Mafia table', a great big booth meant to seat about six, on a platform commanding one end of the restaurant, with a great people-watching view. Thoughtfully, both places were set so that we were next to each other on the side of the giant table with the view.

If it's your first visit, it's absolutely essential that you choose something interesting from the extensive tea list (there's a link to a pdf of the full list at the bottom of the linked page) and that you order the Miang Kum for your starter. It's the house special, and a rare dish that I've not found in any other Thai restaurant. Miang Kum is a peasant-style dish consisting of freshly roast peanuts (not a hint of bitterness here - the peanuts had been roasted that evening); tiny preserved shrimp; little cubes of ginger; slivers of bird's eye chilli; miniature dice of lime, flesh, skin and all; shallot pieces; and freshly toasted, shredded coconut. You take a pinch of each ingredient and wrap it in a fresh spinach leaf, daubed with some of chef Bo Kline's sweet signature sauce, and pop the little parcel in your mouth. An astonishing burst of flavours results - bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and deeply savoury all at once. I roared through the shrimp rather faster than the other ingredients, but our attentive waitress went straight to the kitchen to find some more - and when we came back later in the week and ordered the Miang Kum again, she recognised us and brought out an extra bowl of the shrimp. There's service.

This dish sets the quality for the rest of the meal. Ingredients are fresh and bright, and sourcing is impeccable - the prawns at Typhoon are wild, not farmed, and only cuts like tenderloin and sirloin are served. "How," asked Dr W, "are they making things taste this much without MSG?" I can only guess that there was magic in the fish sauce.

Almost everything we ate on both visits was a standout. Papaya salad was clean, fresh and full of zip. The house fried rice arrived looking unexceptional - but once in the mouth was nearly good enough to make me give up cooking. Pineapple rice, full of curry spices and the fresh fruit, could have made a generous meal on its own. Eggplant Lover made the most of this vegetable's ability to soak up flavours (black bean in this case) and of its gorgeously velvety texture, contrasting beautifully with chunks of tofu. The larb, lip-numbingly hot, was much better than the Lotus of Siam version. Dr W ordered half a five-spice roast duck with buns from a specials list and hasn't stopped talking about it since. The beef with grapes was inspired. And neither meal left us with room for pudding.

Sometimes I look around myself in Cambridge and wonder what the hell we're doing. Perhaps our problem is high property prices making restaurant pitches unaffordable to everybody but the mega-chains like Wagamama, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Pret a Manger and Subway. This doesn't excuse the downright lousy quality of some of our independent restaurants, though - we're particularly weak on good Asian places. We don't have any good, well-priced food of the sort that Portland seems to offer several times on every city block. Don't the English care about what they're eating? If you're lucky enough to be in Portland, grab the opportunity to visit Typhoon and congratulate yourself on being in a city where identikit cardboard meals aren't standard.

Radio silence

I hope you've all been missing me. Dr W and I are away for a few weeks' work and (mostly) skiing on the West Coast of America. Normal service will resume in mid-February, but in the meantime I encourage anyone who happens to be in Portland, Oregon, to run as fast as they can to Typhoon at the Lucia Hotel on Broadway, where the Thai food is even better than it was at Lotus of Siam in Vegas. (LoS is the restaurant that Gourmet Magazine called the best Thai in the USA. Perhaps I caught them on a bad night and Typhoon on a very good one, but although LoS gave us a great meal, Typhoon gave us one that's making me consider a bigamous marriage so I can get a green card and come and live in Portland so that I can eat there every night.)

Lotus of Siam, Las Vegas

I'm back in Las Vegas, one of my favourite eating destinations, for the Christmas holidays. One of the restaurants I'd been very excited about visiting for the first time was Lotus of Siam, a tiny Thai place in a mall about a mile away from the north (grotty) end of the Strip.

Strip malls aren't the kind of place I spend a lot of time in when I'm in Vegas. This particular mall sports Serge's Wigs (a shop for showgirls looking to buy luxuriant hair), and a pole-dancing club. But Gourmet Magazine announced a few years ago that Lotus of Siam is the best Thai restaurant in North America, so there wasn't any question about it - we were going. Saipin Chutima, the lady in charge of the kitchen here, learned to cook from her grandmother, and as a result you'll find some fascinating family recipes from northern Thailand on the extensive menu.

Don't visit Lotus of Siam at lunchtime, when the rather undistinguished Chinese buffet is on offer; instead, go in the evening and ask for some of the more unusual offerings on the menu, like the Issan dishes which come on a separate menu. We heard other tables being asked what sort of chilli spicing they preferred on a scale from one to ten, but unfortunately we weren't offered the choice and ended up with some less tongue-numbing food than we'd have preferred. This isn't the place to ask for a green curry, a Pad Thai or whatever else you usually order in your local Thai - these dishes will be excellent, but why would you order something you recognise when you can ask for something like the exceptional sour Issan sausage (a little like a Thai cross between mortadella and salami), a dish you won't find anywhere else?

We asked for Nam Kao Tod - that sausage in a crispy rice salad (see left) as one of our starters. There were tastes here I've never experienced before; darkly crisp, deep-fried rice grains marinaded before cooking in something deeply savoury, mixed with the slightly sour sausage cubes and aromatic herbs. Issan pork jerky was less thin, dry and chewy than I'd anticipated - it was juicy and caramelised, served with a little tamarind sauce to drizzle over. Dr W, gargling with porky joy, attempted to annex the whole dish for himself.

A crispy catfish salad (see the picture at the top of this post) was my favourite part of the whole meal. It's seldom you find catfish that doesn't taste slightly muddy, but this was fabulously fresh and delicate. The tiny pieces of catfish were fried to a crisp, and heaped on top of a sweet lime-drenched salad made from more handfuls of fresh herbs, roasted cashews, thin strips of carrot, apple, ginger, onion, cabbage and other vegetables. These lively and fresh-tasting salads provide a brilliant foil to some of the darker and more syrupy flavours in the main courses we selected: Kra Phao Moo Krob, a crispy preparation of belly pork with a deeply savoury sauce and lots of Thai holy basil; and Nua Sao Renu, strips of charcoal-grilled steak, still pink in the middle, anointed with another tamarind sauce. (This needed lots of rice to mop up the sauce, which was so packed with flavour my tastebuds could barely cope with it.)

We were too full to manage dessert - a shame, because the coconut rice in particular sounded glorious. Is Gourmet Magazine right in calling this the best Thai restaurant in North America? I'm not sure - these flavours are so different from the Thai meals I've had before I find it hard to contextualise, and I've been to very few American Thai restaurants. But I am certain of one thing - it was so good that we'll be eating there at least once more before we go home after Christmas.

Sticky Thai garlic-chilli prawns

One of the things the area I live in really lacks is a good fishmonger. As a result, raw prawns with the shells still on are very hard to find, so whenever I spot them in the supermarket I grab about six bags and freeze them.

Why do I want to keep the shells on, you ask? It's perfectly simple; cooked like this, the shells not only add rich flavour to the flesh of the prawns, but become delicious in their own right. They're a little crunchy, a little chewy, and extremely tasty, so don't bother peeling your prawn - eat it shell and all. I wish my prawns has also had heads (ask any Chinese person; the head is the best bit), but head-on raw prawns are increasingly hard to find these days.

I was planning on barbecuing these little guys, but the summer of torrential rain shows no signs of abating, and I've barely been able to use the barbecue at all this year. If the weather's this bad where you are, put the prawns under the conventional grill. Lucky readers living where there's sunshine and enough warmth to eat outdoors should drag out the barbecue for this one.

To cook enough prawns for a very substantial meal for two (or a sensibly sized meal for three) you'll need:

500g raw, defrosted prawns with the shells on (raw frozen prawns will be blue-grey, not pink)
4 tablespoons light soya sauce
2 tablespoons sweet dark soya sauce (kejap manis)
4 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce
2 tablespoons honey
1 bird's eye chilli
1 head garlic
1 large handful coriander, chopped

Use a sharp knife to butterfly the prawns - make a slit between the prawn's legs from the base of the tail to the place where the head was, slicing through the flesh, but not through the shell on the prawn's back. Flatten the prawns out with your hand. Cutting the prawns like this will maximise the surface area, helping them to take up the flavour of the marinade.

Mince all the cloves from the head of garlic with a large, sharp knife. (This is very easy - just lay the cloves on a chopping board and, holding the knife at the tip and the hilt and using a rocking motion, 'walk' the blade up and down the board for about five minutes. You'll find the garlic is chopped finely and evenly. It's probably not best to eat this immediately before going on a date.) Chop the chilli finely and mix it and the garlic with all the liquid ingredients. Stir the marinade mixture well to blend everything, then tip the prawns in, stirring to make sure they're well covered. Refrigerate for 40 minutes. This is quite a penetrating marinade, so don't leave the prawns for more than an hour or they will taste too strong.

When you are ready to cook the prawns, reserve the marinade and place them on a barbecue or under a very hot grill for three or four minutes per side, until they turn pink and the skins start to caramelise a little. Meanwhile, bring the marinade to a strong boil for about thirty seconds. Drizzle a little of the wonderfully garlicky cooked marinade over the prawns to serve, and dress with plenty of fresh coriander...and remember to eat those delicious shells!

Green curry

Thai green curry is fierce stuff. A green chicken curry is also pretty easy to make at home; with half an hour to spare you can produce a wok full of searingly hot, aromatic deliciousness.

Although you can make your own curry paste from spices and fermented fish paste at home, I've found that Mae Ploy's green curry paste is so good and so convenient I don't bother any more. Some UK supermarkets stock it (I've seen it in Waitrose and Sainsbury's), you'll find it in oriental supermarkets as a matter of course, and it's available online in the UK and through Amazon in the US, where you can buy things to eat while you read your books. Please do not believe what it says on the pot. If you use three tablespoons of this extremely hot paste in a curry of this size, you'll lose sensation in most of your digestive tract for the rest of the evening (which may be a blessing). I love hot curries, but there's a point past which even my tastebuds refuse to go.

To serve two you'll need:

1 can coconut milk
2 tablespoons Mae Ploy green curry paste
2 large chicken breasts, boned and skinned
8 small aubergines, halved, or one large one cut into pieces
1 small can bamboo shoots
1 tablespoon palm sugar (substitute soft brown sugar if you can't find any)
5 kaffir lime leaves, torn
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 handful basil leaves

I couldn't find any kaffir lime leaves - they'd sold out at the Malaysian supermarket I went to in London at the weekend, so I used the pared zest of a lime instead. If your supermarket stocks Bart's Spices, you should be able to find freeze-dried kaffir lime leaves, which work very well.

I like to use Chaokoh coconut milk (Americans can find it here, and Brits here; it's very inexpensive and extremely useful in the kitchen, so stock up on plenty). It's something Rosemary Brissenden's excellent South East Asian Food put me onto; when cooking a Thai curry, you need to look out for a coconut milk like Chaokoh, without emulsifiers, thickeners and God knows what else. This is because you'll be cooking with the thick part of the milk, which will float to the top of the can, until it separates and releases its oil - in a coconut milk with added gubbins, the oil will never separate out, no matter how much you cook it. You need this oil for flavour, and because it's the fat you'll be 'frying' the curry's ingredients in.

Chop all your ingredients before you start. Put the thick, solid part of the coconut milk in the wok (about half a can of a watery-looking liquid will remain in the can), and cook it, stirring, over a high flame until it is bubbling and the oil has separated from it. Add two tablespoons of curry paste to the wok and carry on stirring until the paste no longer smells harsh and raw - you'll notice a mellow, aromatic fragrance starts to develop.

Add the chicken to the wok and continue to 'fry' until the meat has all changed colour. As you stir, add the remaining liquid from the coconut can, a tablespoon at a time. Add the sugar, fish sauce, lime leaves or zest and vegetables to the wok and turn the heat down. Simmer for about eight minutes, until the meat and vegetables are cooked through and the sauce has thickened a little. Taste a little of the sauce to check the seasoning and adjust if you want to.

Take the wok off the heat and stir in a large handful of basil, torn roughly. Thai basil is much more fragrant, with a delicious edge of anise, but if you can't find any, the European sort will be fine. Serve on top of a bowl of rice, and make sure you allow plenty of the delicious sauce to soak into the rice.

Ar Jard sauce

You've tried this before - it's the crunchy, raw vegetable relish served in many Thai restaurants. I served it alongside some sweet chilli sauce with Thai pork toasts. It's very easy, and can be prepared in minutes, so if you've a little time, try shaping your vegetables. Somehow a carrot tastes about 300% nicer if it's approximately flower-shaped.

The sauce is delicious with rich dishes like the pork toasts; it's fresh, sweet and sharp, cutting through the intense savouriness of the little toasts. I didn't use any chilli in this recipe, but if you'd like your sauce to be spicy, take a red chilli, shred it finely and add it to the rest of the vegetables.

You'll need:

2 carrots
½ cucumber
1 shallot
1 cup rice vinegar (available in some supermarkets and all oriental grocers)
⅔ cup caster sugar

Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan over a low heat, and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside.

While the vinegar mixture is cooling, dice the vegetables into even-sized pieces. Exercise your artistic side if you like, and cut them into shapes. I cut mine freehand, but you can buy minuscule aspic cutters online and in kitchen shops - they're like fairy cookie cutters, and if you're like me, they're pretty irresistible. Slice the shallot into thin slices.

Pour the cooled sugar and vinegar mixture over the diced vegetables. Serve immediately.

Thai pork toasts

Kanom Punk Na Moo, or pork toasts, are right up there with my favourite unhealthy Thai starters. If you're not familiar with them, imagine a Chinese sesame prawn toast without the sesame and the prawns, but with a moist and fragrant layer of pork instead. The little toasts are deep-fried, which makes the bread crisp and seals the rich, savoury coating's flavour in. Some recipes use prawn in the mixture with the pork, but this is as authentic, less expensive and really, really delicious. This is unusual in being a Thai recipe whose ingredients are pretty easy to get hold of in the UK.

It's important that you use boring old supermarket white, sliced bread in this recipe. Your home-made, stone-ground wheat loaf may be delicious toasted for breakfast, but it just won't work in this recipe; you need plain old white bread here. (There are a few things for which nothing but sliced white will do, including the fried bread which accompanies your cooked breakfast.)

To serve six you'll need:

750g minced pork
6 tablespoons mushroom soya sauce (available at oriental grocers' shops)
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour
2 handfuls minced coriander
4 chopped spring onions
6 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
8 slices white bread
Oil for deep frying

Remove the crusts from the bread and cut each slice into quarters.

Mix the pork, soya sauce, cornflour, coriander, spring onions, garlic, egg and pepper in a large bowl, using your hands, until everything is well blended. Use a spatula to press a tablespoon or so of mixture into each little piece of bread, cutting more bread if you need it.

Heat fresh oil to 190°C, and fry the little toasts in batches for six minutes each. That's it; you're done. Serve with Thai sweet chilli sauce and Ar Jard sauce.

Weeping Tiger

It's a chromosomal abnormality passed on by my father (Chinese by way of Malaysia); every week or so I find myself subject to an overwhelming craving for oriental food. One kitchen cupboard is kept full of Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese condiments, including seven kinds of soy sauce, numerous sticky brown things in jars, hermetically sealed packets of blachan (the stinkiest thing in the house, but completely necessary in a lot of Malaysian and Thai dishes), dried fungus, four different kinds of dried noodle, four kinds of rice (not including the two risotto rices in the other cupboard), lye water, pork floss, fish floss, rice wines, black and red vinegars and some mysterious tins which have lost their labels. This is all in order that this craving can be assuaged any time it hits, as long as I'm in the house.

The craving thumped me between the eyes this time when we were expecting some friends. Weeping Tiger, a Thai beef dish, would hit the spot, with some Chinese noodles for some stodge. I took a good-sized piece of sirloin steak per person, and rubbed each well with kejap manis, an Indonesian sweet soy sauce.

I made some Nuoc Mam Gung - a sweet, salty, strong sauce made from raw ingredients. I put a peeled piece of ginger the length of my forefinger, two peeled limes, four cloves of garlic, half a stalk of peeled lemongrass, two birds eye chilis, four tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fermented fish sauce - I use Squid Brand, a Thai premium brand, because it has a fabulous label) and four tablespoons of caster sugar into the Magimix, and whizzed the lot until I had a sauce. If you follow this recipe, you may prefer to use less chili; taste the sauce when it's out of the blender and see whether you think it needs more lime juice or fish sauce. You may want to add a little water if you find it too strong.

After the sirloins had marinated for half an hour, I grilled them in a very hot, stovetop grill-pan, keeping the middles pink (about two minutes per side). The steaks were then sliced very thin and placed, still warm, on top of a crisp salad with grated carrot, Chinese leaves, cabbage, shallot, mint leaves and coriander leaves. The nuoc mam gung I'd made earlier was drizzled on top - delicious.

This dish is notably lacking in carbohydrate. To remedy this, I made a very simple garlic cauliflower noodle stir fry which my Dad used to make regularly when my brother and I were little; real childhood comfort food.

This dish needs pea thread noodles - a very thin noodle made from mung beans. These noodles are one of my favourite kinds; they're thread-thing, transluscent and glassy, and they don't go slimy in sauces. I broke off half a packet and made them soft in boiling water, then drained them and rinsed them under the tap in a sieve. At the same time, I took eight dried shitake mushrooms and put them in boiling water to rehydrate. When they were soft I sliced them thinly.

To serve four people, I broke up a large cauliflower into bite-sized florets. I stir-fried six roughly chopped cloves of garlic in very hot groundnut oil, added the cauliflower and mushrooms after about a minute and stir-fried that for another three minutes. I then added a pint of chicken stock (I usually keep home-made stock in the freezer, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with a stock cube if you don't have the time), half a glass of Shaosing rice wine, about three tablespoons of mushroom soy and the same amount of light soy. I then put the lid on the wok for four minutes. Lid off, noodles in, taste, add more soy sauce. (I also add half a teaspoon of MSG at this point, which will doubtless cause gasps of horror from my Mum when she reads this; sorry Mummy.)

I thought my Chinese food craving had been squashed for the week. Unfortunately, writing this meal up has made it come back again. Time for a pork floss sandwich.

Lunchtime update:
Emails and comments have been arriving asking what the hell pork floss is. It's not something I shall be cooking for you, since I don't want another bout of RSI (this is a dish which needs several hours' constant stirring); besides, it's one of those things I always fill suitcases with when returning from Malaysia. There's an excellent post at Umami on pork floss, which I commend to you.

Pork floss is, simply, lean, lean pork cooked with spices, sugar and sauces until the muscle fibres come apart in a dry, flossy mass; it melts in the mouth and tastes beautiful. It's a gorgeous garnish, a delicious snack and one of my favourite things.