cooking is fun when there's someone to chop up the ingredients and do all the washing up. at the four seasons chiang mai, we learned to make thai salads, and while preparing it all was a cinch, shopping for those same ingredients in hong kong will be the real challenge. we picked up northern thai chili flakes while we were out there, but instead of seasoning larb (better known in our household as SMS -- spicy meaty shit) ended up using them last night to spice up pizza box's meat lover's and bbq duck breast pies. other useless skills picked up while on holiday -- how to carve a carrot into a leaf, curl a sprig of scallion and transform a big chili into an orchid.
