Tara's Tiffin Club

14/01/2025

Smoked Mackerel & kimchi bowl, packed with all the good stuff that I love!

I love smoked mackerel, I use it in salads and sometimes make it into pate. I also make a similar bowl with teriyaki tofu which is delicious and a total vegan treat.

I’m also going through a Tajin phase, so I’m covering everything in it! It works so well with almost anything 🩷🐠🐟🥦

04/01/2025

Lots of artichokes around at the moment & I keep buying them because they are so beautiful, but I’m never very good at cooking them, usually boiling them or steaming them and then being slightly disappointed by the results. I don’t have an air fryer, but I remember a lovely, crispy, lemony artichoke dish I ate in Italy long before air fryers were around. Any idea’s? 🍋🩷

11/10/2024

When your daughter takes you to Chinatown for brunch and your normally “vegetarian” diet takes flight and goes crying up the street! One of my favourite meals in the world - roast meat rice and dim sum, happy days 🥟😊🍚😋

19/09/2024

A massive thank you to the people that came to support me & join in the cookbook conversation this morning at Sunbury Library. It was great chatting about the food that makes us happy and celebrate life, especially lovely to hear everyone’s stories. I will be continuing the cookbook club for the rest of the year & hope that we get more people to join in 🩷

07/09/2024

Come join me at Sunbury Library for a morning of all things Books and Cooks. I am really looking forward to meeting you and hearing your kitchen stories. Deliciously yours xx

Get ready to swap recipes, share cooking tips, and enjoy delicious food at Tara's Tiffin Cookbook Club!

20/08/2024

Salad “pulpo a la gallega”, I love the creative process of a meal. I started this with a tin of “polvo” from my recent trip to Faro, knowing I wanted a cold dish. I had some pre boiled potatoes to hand, so pulpo a la gallega immediately came to mind & the kernel of the idea was sown. I find this way of cooking so therapeutic as a creative excercise, combining ingredients in a way that pleases you.

In September I am starting a series of Cookbook Clubs, talking about cooking creatively and enjoying the process. The sheer, simple joy of it! First club will be at the Sunbury Library on the 19th September and I can’t wait. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time & it is exciting to have a date. Will post more as we get closer to the date. 📚🍅🌶️

16/08/2024

Fish & tofu Tacos - these are things I would never think of making, but I actually really enjoyed. I’ve been making lots of pickles including the chillies and the red onions which added a lovely tartness, but are probably not usual ingredients.

Mexican & South American food on the whole is not really part of my culinary experience and what I do know seems to be meat heavy (lechona, feijoada, chilli con carne, carne asado). Since I don’t eat meat, I am looking for more fish/veg based food to try. Moqueca is high on my list, if anyone know anywhere that does it in London or a good recipe please let me know. Peruvian Japanese (Nekkei) food intrigues me, but again I don’t know much about it. I think I’ll have to get my daughter to translate some recipes from Spanish for me🍅🌶️🫑

09/08/2024

Plant burger with roast vegetables and Dijon mayo on a focaccia bun with oven chips and salad. Pudding - chocolate mouse with a berry compote made from raspberries and blackberries (which I picked while walking to the surplus store).

When I get my act together, I go to a local surplus food charity shop where you can fill a shopping bag for £8. It’s a wonderful pick and mix, which really gets my creativity flowing as most things have to be cooked ASAP. It also means that I eat things that I wouldn’t usual buy, like these plant burgers. Everything (except the mayo and salad dressing) came from the shop, so this meal cost me approx 60p! As well as supporting an excellent charity, stopping food from going to waste and saving a shed load of money (regular cost £4.50) I got an enormous amount of satisfaction from the creative process. Win, win situation.

When I saw the amount of compote that the blackberries made, I realised that foraging sounds incredibly romantic, but for the most part is a lot of time for minimal harvest- feels good though!

I wonder what treats lie in store this week? Have a great weekend 🍔🫑🥗🥬

25/07/2024

I have often been accused of gate keeping my recipes. I don’t & the following “recipe” explains why - this curry started its life as a yellow sticker (50p) tray of cut mangoes. I bought because I thought I would make sorbet, but my freezer was iced up & I couldn’t get anything in there. So, I decided to make chutney, despite not having malt vinegar. I used white vinegar and the chutney was so tart that it was inedible.

A week later and I found some prawns for £2 and thought a curry would be nice, but I didn’t have tamarind. “I’ll use a spoonful of the chutney” I thought, except that I accidentally dropped the whole tub in, so had to add extra coconut milk to temper it. The small packet of prawns was lost in the sauce, so I added a packet of ladies fingers (okra) that my mother gave me (we gift each other groceries a lot!).Result - the most delicious curry ever! Tart, hot, creamy and just gorgeous. Problem is I’ll probably never be able to recreate it & as for gate keeping the recipe, I don’t even know it myself! 😂🌶️🍤🤣

22/07/2024

All this came to £10 (including prawns, not filmed) which equals 40pence per item. All from a local charity called Surplus to Supper. This week I’m going to make my meals from what I have here & in my store cupboard, follow my progress 🌶️🍤🥬

17/07/2024

I’ve been looking through my photo’s and there is definitely a noodle theme going on! I do eat other things, but they tend to be of the “ugly delicious” variety & therefore I don’t photograph them. Will have to start talking about the curries, dhals, casseroles and other dishes that don’t look pretty, but taste great….so last noodle post for a while 😂🍜

06/07/2024

Sri Lankan Lamprais from the Ceylon Bake House, utterly delicious. I discovered this place while swapping buses in an area that I would never have gone to otherwise. In the two rows of shops on either side of a busy road there is a Portuguese deli & cafe (Lisboa Loja), a Nepalese store with a take away next door selling momo & an Indian biriyani restaurant. There was also an Afro Caribbean shop and a few other places which I didn’t get a chance to check out before my bus came!

Lamprais are traditionally comprised of a mixed meat curry, ghee rice, ash plantain, frikkadeller meatballs, belacan, seeni sambol, eggplant pahi. I went for the fish one and it was so tasty. This dish, with its Dutch, Indonesian roots of deliciousness was introduced to me when I was living in Colombo and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it! What a wonderful surprise this turned out to be, I will be definitely be going back to check out the other places. It is what I love about the massive melting pot that is the London food scene 🌶️

01/07/2024

Foodie blog about Char Kway Teow and other things 🌶️

I am permanently perplexed by (but not limited to) restaurant and food jargon, for example “homecooked” – why have I left my house, travelled some distance and spent my money, simply to eat somethi…

07/06/2024

Seafood linguini with prawns, squid and chilli 🌶️🦐🦑

Been a bit of a strange week, I’ve been feeling a bit lack lustre & that is exactly how I would describe my cooking at the moment. All the ingredients were there for a great dish & although it tasted fine, it lacked any real interest. Emotion, feeling & joy are so often the ingredients that we forget, are the ones that make a meal really sing. Do you find this when you cook?

Also the emotion we bring to the table plays a big part, you can’t exactly enjoy a meal if you are crying into your soup! 🥰😭😡

# #

13/05/2024

Breakfast Malaysian style.

50cent Nasi Lemak ikan from the old Malay lady at the bottom of the grass slope, outside immigration in Damansara, KL in the 90’s - that is my best breakfast of all time. I would run down from the house, always late, and buy several packets before jumping in a cab to get to work in PJ.

In later years it was the agonising choice between Curry Mee from the beautiful lady in the market or Hokkien Mee from the old auntie across the road. Now it’s a bowl of granola or eggs, neither inspires much joy to get the day off to a good start. Yesterday, I had a big bowl of noodles, a strong coffee and a boiled egg before heading to work. It made me so happy 🤗🌶️🦐🍜

11/05/2024

Really simple red prawn curry and cucumber salad on a warm day. The prawns are part of a large haul of seafood from a fantastic fish shop in Houslow. I am continuing my “no supermarket” shopping and am amazed by the abundance of fresh, affordable food there is out there when you leave the big names behind. This is one of the benefits of proximity to London, not so easy in the countryside. Really craving spice at the moment in food and life - getting it in food 🙈🥥🌶️🦐