Two light and sprightly Thai dishes for spring: mushroom tom yum soup with rice noodles, and crisp cauliflower in a sweet-sour tamarind sauce ”Gin khao yung?” – or “Have you eaten yet?” – is a way of saying hello in Thailand. It’s similar to “‘What’s up?” and “How’s it going?”, and is an indication of just how important food is in the everyday lives of Thai people. These recipes from my book, Thai Made Easy, are two classics reinvented with plant-based ingredients – simple to assemble and suitable for most ..read more

Three joyful dishes for a new year: a mild yellow curry, street food-style fried pork and a simple dish of baked mackerel and rice Songkran, the Thai New Year on 13 April, is a vibrant and joyous celebration marked by a famous water festival that symbolises the cleansing of the past year’s misfortunes through playful water fights and anointing one’s elders with water at the hottest time of year. Traditional Thai dishes play a central role, reflecting the culinary heritage that unites families and communities at this auspicious time ..read more

All four Thai flavour sensations – salty, sweet, sour and fragrant – feature in a prawn salad with green mango and peanuts and a pineapple coconut lime loaf for dessert I still remember the first time I tried Thai green mango salad. It was, and is, a heady combination of flavours: salt, in both crystals and from fish sauce; sugar, preferably unrefined; fresh chilli, lots of it; citrus tang from the lime; and lots of aromatic notes from the herbs. It’s also very simple to bash together at home, as is this embellished version with prawns and peanuts. Just make sure you have a large pestle and mo ..read more

Inspired by Thai gai yang, this chargrilled chicken is marinated in a salty-sour sauce, then cooked in its own fat and served with a zingy salad Welcome to a livestream from my kitchen, where I am eating this dish while I write about it. It is inspired by gai yang, a Thai dish of chargrilled chicken marinated in lemongrass, lime, coriander, garlic and fish sauce, and served with a crunchy, zippy salad. I serve mine with jasmine rice, to soak up all the fragrant juices from the chicken and dressing. Don’t be deterred by the ingredients list: it may look long, but you’ll likely have a lot of it ..read more

Meaty jackfruit takes the place of fish in this fresh and fragrant Thai-style curry with vermicelli noodles Forget about breakfast at Tiffany’s: breakfast in Phuket is where it’s at. At Pa Mai, you can pull up a plastic stool to a table resplendent with the finest herbs, pickles and fresh fruit Thailand has to offer. And those are just the accoutrements: the star of the show is the khanom chin buffet, where coils of handmade, fermented rice noodles sit waiting for you to ladle over your choice of (frankly, an embarrassment) of coconut milk curries. Back home in the UK, my breakfasts are not qu ..read more

Golden fried boiled eggs in a salty-sour curry sauce with a crunchy toasted coconut topping, and Thai baked chicken in a coconut sambal sauce Thai New Year, or Songkran, is celebrated next weekend. Traditionally, water symbolises happiness and purity across the kingdom, and the festivities culminate in a huge nationwide water fight. If there’s an end-of-festival tradition more delightfully fun than this, I’m not sure what it is. I’d love to be in Thailand myself one year, water pistol in tow, but for now, I’ll be in the kitchen having almost as much fun. I’ll also certainly be staying dry whil ..read more

The chilli-lime peanut dressing makes this dish sing with flavour, and you can cook the rice in a microwave The dressing in this recipe elevates anything into a great quick dinner. With peanuts, lime and chilli, it can go on pretty much everything, but it’s particularly good on just-roasted aubergines. Add broccoli, rice and a nice soft-boiled egg, and you’ve got all your food groups in one easy, 30-minute dish ..read more

The fast show: Thai-style deep-fried omelette, spicy tofu with broccoli, and sea bass and seaweed spaghetti Twenty-nine-, 28-, 18-minute meals: it’s a bold and, in this case, slightly tongue-in-cheek move to set a stopwatch on exactly how long it takes to get dinner on the table. Whatever the precise timing, though, the key to a pretty quick meal, if we can just call it that, is threefold. One: have a few punchy ingredients to hand – sheets of seaweed, hot chilli sauces and quick pickles are all fast ways to get maximum flavour into a meal. Two: choose a main ingredient that cooks really quick ..read more

Kylie Kwong, Sofia Levin, Junda Khoo and more share their favourite restaurants and other culinary discoveries of the year The best thing I ate in 2023 was a Kensington Pride mango. I was in rural NSW, it was 38C, dry enough for my lips to peel like a lizard’s skin and I was playing Scrabble with my mum. The mango was our half-time snack. Maybe it was the dehydration or hunger talking, but this mango was magnificent. Like how pistachio ice-cream can be more pistachio-y than the nut itself, the flavour of 100 mangos seemed packed into one. It was utterly joyous, like finding out your crush like ..read more

A sort-of Japanese, Thai-influenced and deeply experimental restaurant Bonsai in Brighton serves up the likes of vegan “sea bream” made with titivated pea protein and Mongolian “lamb” skewers with pickled shallot, though at some point in time, perhaps in a few decades, I hope to describe such things without fervent debate breaking out about the merits or otherwise of fake fish or meat, or indeed the use of inverted commas. Or the merits of textured vegetable protein, or whether vegans should use the word “pork” when many seem to think it should be saved strictly to describe bits of actual pig ..read more