There are lots of things that we get wrong about Tibet and Tibetan people. The no. 2 misconception (let's move past the no. 1 mistake - ,Tibet is not Nepal) is that Tibetans are vegetarians. Sorry! It's a lovely idea, one that fits in well with the notion that Tibetans spend most of their lives in prayer, and are therefore somehow holy. The reality is that Tibetans are human just like the rest of us, and meat-eating is a part of this. It's true that the Buddha advocated a suffering-free diet, but note that this doesn't mean meat-free - it all depends on how the animal comes to its end. As Bud ..read more

Tibetan people don't use cookbooks - Yeshi didn't even know that such things existed before he came to the UK. Tibetans learn to cook at a young age by watching and helping in the kitchen or - as in Yeshi's case - inside the family's yak hair tent out in the wilds. Greenhouses have made their way in to the villages in recent years: Yeshi's sister, Dolma, is pictured above collecting home-grown vegetables for lunch. But when Yeshi was growing up ,there were no shops or hothouses, and when he was on the Plateau moving the animals from pasture to pasture ingredient variety was more limited still ..read more

Food is central to our story. People often say how lucky I am to have Yeshi cook for me every day, but this was a strategic move on my part. Yeshi's delicious dishes made their way into my life on the day that we met and I haven't looked back since. Let me backtrack. We met on a mountain path in McLeod Ganj, a small town in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. It was November, and it was cold. The Himalayan langur, a large, shy, silvery-coloured monkey that usually lives at higher elevation, had descended due to the icy conditions, and I was a tourist trying to get pictures. Yeshi was walki ..read more

One year ago today we submitted the manuscript for the book that has now landed - finally - in our hands (for those of you who may be confused, the one on display in our restaurant was just a prop: when ,Saturday Kitchen visited last August ,our publishers did what they could to get a copy on camera, but it was actually someone else's cookbook with a mocked-up Taste Tibet sleeve). We had started to wonder if we'd ever get a copy of our own. It seemed like everyone else had one (,Ken Hom has 5!) but we know now that publishing - like all industries - has its ways, and that if we just sit tight ..read more

Has anyone been watching Jamie Oliver's new Channel 4 show, ,The Great Cookbook Challenge? Eighteen chefs/home cooks are competing to win a cookbook deal with Penguin imprint Michael Joseph. I can hardly bear to watch, it makes me so nervous. Not sure why - ,our book Taste Tibet is already in the bag, and we didn't have to dance in front of a camera to land the deal. We are so lucky! Our publisher ,Murdoch Books have been fantastic to work with and there is no one half as terrifying on the team as Michael Joseph MD and chief judge ,Louise Moore. Last weekend Jamie Oliver wrote ,a piece for Th ..read more

It's the Lunar New Year today. The Spring Festival, as it's known in China, is an occasion that's actually celebrated right across East Asia, usually on the same date. So it's New Year in Vietnam, Korea and Mongolia, as well as for many in the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and so on. Happy New Year! Tibetan people usually celebrate their New Year (Losar) at the same time, but the Tibetan calendar is lunisolar, which means that it is regulated by the positions of both the sun and the moon. The days are calculated according to the solar calendar (like ours), and the ..read more

Did you spy Yeshi in ,Saturday's Guardian? He was hard to miss. Deborah Linton interviewed us as part of ,a wider piece about the immigrant-run restaurants that bring life to Britain's streets. Yeshi's smiling face beamed out from a double-page spread, but his journey - like those of many of the others - has been anything but straightforward. Yeshi left his homeland without meaning to stay away forever: he crossed the Himalayas to help his younger brother join a monastery in India, and ended up staying over there himself. In the picture above he had just arrived in Dharamsala, where we later ..read more

This is not the most abundant season in Tibet. The lunar new year - coming soon - is a marker for farmers to get back to the fields, but until they can be sure that the frost will stay away most people are not enjoying a wide range of fruit or vegetables. Peaches and apricots are harvested and dried in the late autumn and hugely appreciated over winter. Vegetables such as cabbages, potatoes and turnips are stored away in caves to keep the frost at bay, and can be used over long periods. And mooli, a large, crisp, white radish that is widely used in Tibetan cuisine as a whole, gets its centre ..read more

Yeshi's family are just back from ,a long stay in Lhasa, Tibet's capital. Last week they sent this picture of mum and dad picnicking outside one of Lhasa's holy sites. In Tibet, ,picnicking is a hugely popular summertime activity, but it happens during the winter months as well, especially on trips away. ,Yeshi's parents take huge bags of food along with them when they travel. They want to make sure that they have their cheese and their barley. It helps them to feel at home even when they are far from the land to which they are normally so closely tied. Yak meat is another fixture at picnics ..read more

Happy new year, momo lovers! We are just back from a mini-break in Wales and realising that some New Year's resolutions need to be made. 1. Spend more time with Master and Little Miss Taste Tibet. They are suddenly very big (they get it from mum, I always say), and we know we must enjoy them while they still allow us near. 2. Get out more! We love our new premises, but we miss the nomadic life and the great outdoors. We have some firm festival plans already in place for the summer (,Glastonbury and the ,Hay Literary Festival among them), but for best results, Yeshi needs regular airing. 3. Ex ..read more