Yak & Yeti, Crystal Palace

We're not short of an Indian restaurant or two in the Palace and most of them aren't too bad either. Viva Goa stands out for its concentration on regional cuisine - the surest cure for the winter blues I know of.

But, folks, we have a new contender for Best Indian Restaurant in the Palace. I give you Yak & Yeti on Church Road, featuring Nepalese and Indian cuisine. I have eaten in and taken out and both times, it's been wondrous. Let me expound.

Tha Papri Chat - that tangy tamarind-laced starter with potatoes and crisp breads and chillies is enough the stimulate the appetite - and the Momo dumplings (vegetarian on our visit), a Kathmandu Valley delicacy, are delicately spiced and not overly heavy.

Kukhura Palak is chicken cooked with spinach, a mild creamy dish with enough interest in the spicing to stop you falling asleep. Achari Gosht was a rich tangy lamb dish, cooked in yoghurt with pickling spices - there was no one spice dominating, just a gentle harmony of the whole. I managed to sneak a spoonful of Seafood Mismas - prawns, scallops and shrimps cooked with ginger, garlic, lemon, cumin and coconut milk - The Pescatarian had trouble holding on to the rest of it. Lamb Nepal, barbecued and cooked with mango was sweet without being sickly and suprisingly butch in its delivery.

Naans are uber-fresh and taste it; the standard paneer dish is lifted to new heights with fenugreeek leaves and leave room to scoop up the Baigan Bharta - smoked aubergine pulp - with any naan you've got left.

The house wine is reasonable value and food-match at around £11 and dishes come in at around £2-£4 for a starter and £6-£7.25 for a generous main. I would also just add at the point that both times I dined under the influence of ongoing virus/tonsilitis and that I could still taste and revel in the flavours on offer was a small miracle in itself.

Not many venture to this end of the Triangle, most choosing to stay within reach of Gurkha Cottage. But for my money, once you've made it to the White Hart for a mulled cider, why go back down Westow St to the old when you could hop over the road and embrace the new?

It's all in the seasoning...

Life's a careful, fragile balance, I think we can say. Work-life, love-friends, priorities-commitments - it's all about how many balls and how few hands. Mostly, it carries on just straight as you like, but every now and then, you get thrown a curve ball. Just how you're meant to catch it when you're intent on juggling all the others is anybody's guess, but field it you do and (mixed metaphor fast approaching) what turns out to be on first sight an overdose of searingly hot and unpleasant chilli can turn out to be the very pep it all needed to help it whoosh along like gangbusters, perhaps albeit at a tangent to the original.

All of which is a ramblingly musing way of saying that we could learn a lot from Vietnamese cuisine. No, really. Bear with me. It seems to me they've got it down - that blend of sweet, sour, salty, fresh and every now and then a zing of chilli to waken the tastebuds. This was made crystal-clear to me at last night's feast at Mien Tay, Clapham Junction's newly-opened sister branch to the one in Shoreditch.

Brace yourselves, it's an orgy of food. So much so, for the first time, I actually understood the invention and appeal of the Roman vomitarium. We started with a fresh salad of thinly sliced beef with coriander and lime, the beef perhaps poached in a little stock or similar so that it was meltingly tender and just cooked.

Followed by a platter of goodies: quail roasted and then sprinkled as desired with a salt-sugar-white pepper mixture and lime; deep-fried soft shell crab looking more than a little 'en crapaud' as the invading French might say; beef wrapped in betel leaves which you eat in the same chopstick-grab as a rice paper-wrapped vermicelli roll and dipped in a delicate chilli sauce; rice-paper spring rolls, crisp as a winter day, filled with minced chicken and prawns and - just as a palate freshener - lightly pickled carrots for crunch and lift.

Followed by beef cooked in coco-juice (guess coconut water, not milk) and wine vinegar in a little pot on a gas burner - DIY fondue Vietnamese-style. Ravishing, the beef swirled in the juices until opaque, then tipped over a vermicelli/salad bowl with a little of the juices and chilli sauce; Goat (who knew?) with galangal, strong-tasting and slightly curried; monster prawns in egg-yolk and garlic sauce (blee, egg, left this one for my fellow trooper); side dishes of morning glory and pak choi with garlic; pho with beef brisket and beef balls, the broth stomach-settling in its crystal-clear, somehow soothing intensity. There could have been more, but at this point my brain was starting to reject the notion of yet more. There should/could have been stir-fried eel and another spicy goat dish - we certainly wanted them - but I couldn't tell you with any certainty we had them, as it all started to blur...

Rainbow seaweed drink - of course - with actual kidney beans lurking in its murky opalescent depths wasn't for me, but the Vietnamese coffee, as rhapsodized over by a certain M. Bourdain, was excellent. They drip strong bitter coffee (gorgeous just as it was) onto a - how can I put this without the imagery seeming off-putting - bottom-floater of condensed milk. Then you stir and drink - sweet and strong and surprisingly addictive for this dedicated non-milk drinker.

There isn't a wine list as such - house wine seems to be whatever they've got on hand, but I noticed tables operating on a BYO, which seems ultimately sensible. Main courses range around the £6 which is an indescribable bargain, considering the quantity of food in each dish - we shared each one comfortably between two.

Despite each dish having its own distinct, hardly faint-hearted flavours, the overwhelming impression was one of levity, of each component working in harmony with the others on the plate, everything there for a purpose, the seasoning minutely adjusted to enhance the main ingredient rather than overwhelm.

Oh, there you go - we're back to balance again. Told you Vietnamese had all the answers.

In which we go a little tomato crazy....

A few ideas on what to do with a glut of tomatoes, be they cherry, small like Sweet Million, or larger like Shirley or Gardener's Delight...

1. A light tomato soup. I was reluctant to make this, as I'm not a massive soup fan and even less of a tomato soup fan. However, it ended up quite well, as I was basing this on a Bloody Mary mix, (it sounded fun to me) even if I say so myself. Roast a roasting tin's worth of tomatoes in the oven until blackened. Meanwhile, sweat a diced onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed and maybe 2-3 sticks of chopped celery in a little olive oil. (NB peel your celery otherwise the stringy bits are horrible). Add some basil stalks and leaves, then tip in your roasted tomatoes and 500ml chicken stock. I cooked it up a bit (I sound like Katharine Hepburn 'we gotta cook it up George') then stirred in a tbsp-ish of horseradish and some Tabasco and some chopped celery leaves. I then whizzed it up with a hand-blender and seasoned. You might want a squeeze of lemon juice or more spice - taste as you go. I then dolloped in creme fraiche for thickening it a little before serving.

This is by no means a thick soup, (and it occurs to me that it would be gorgeous chilled with or without creme fraiche), and you might want some bread - or better perhaps - a toasted cheese sandwich with it....

2. Ketchup. reduce 3kg of tomatoes down to 3 bottles... I am the anti-Jesus. I'm not going to copy it out here, but suffice to say, having perused a few recipes in the collection and ummed and err-ed between Hugh and Jamie, I went for Jamie's recipe in Jamie at Home (which is a good book), but left out the ginger as I felt it wasn't a flavour I wanted in my ketchup. Also, it's worth bearing in mind, although I did double the recipe, it took (and I know this because it was my birthday and this is how I spent it - god damn my dedication) near on 5 hours to make in total. Admittedly, the work involved is pretty minor as you're mostly reducing it down to concentrate flavours, but still it's a pot that needs watching.

3. Pasta sauce. I've given up - for the time being - sweating them in a pan with garlic and oil, as I got bored of the flavour. I now just roast them with lots of seasoning and rosemary and a drizzle of red wine vinegar, then when done to a turn, tipping them over the pasta as they are and drizzling with oil. I notice Nigel last week on t'telly did his with (aargh tinned) black olives and capers - I also like chopped melted anchovies, roasted garlic, lots of basil, etc, etc. Gently torn apart buffalo mozzarella goes well.

4. Roasting them around anything else - tonight grey mullet with cockles, tomatoes, garlic - sort of bouillabaisse flavours....

PS: roasting cockles in a tin like this with everything else makes them more savoury and punchier than you ever might expect. Not one for the faint of heart, but good.

5. Tomato salad - any which way you like, but a sprinkling of chilli flakes does wonders.

6. Green tomatoes - slice thickly, coat in cornmeal/polenta and fry till crisp. What about for breakfast with bacon?

The Settler's Cookbook by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

We rely on food to give us a sense of place, of home. Nowhere is this more true than in the cooking of Britain’s immigrant population, where the rituals of familiar, native dishes re-affirm life’s rhythms and structures, when all else is lost.

In her memoir, The Settler’s Cookbook, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown traces the history of her ancestors, settlers from India brought to East Africa to build the railways, or lured by the promise of a flourishing wealthy society under British colonial rule in independent Uganda. The early chapters describe a ‘land of milk and honey’ – a riot of colour and sensory riches where the Asians found a life of some status, yet never quite letting go of their roots, culinary and otherwise. The tension, however, simmers under the surface, like a slow-cooking dhal, exploding every now and then as the three populations – British, Asian and African – struggle to define their own roles in a convoluted, pressurised system, clashing as they do so.

Idi Amin’s expulsion of many thousands of East African Asians from Uganda in the 1970s forced them to flee to an imperial ‘homeland’ many of them had never been to. Yasmin describes how once again the Asians became settlers, struggling to adjust to yet another culture struggle, another way of life where they were again de-valued, place-less in society and how – once more – food became the anchor as they found their feet.

Her recipes, passed down, thread their way through the book, binding the narrative, lending evocative colour, flavour and aroma. The recipes themselves are gorgeous and demand to be cooked, but a word of warning: the ingredients are not written in user order and it pays to read the whole recipe through first as little things might catch you out, like turning on the oven, or suddenly needing something finely chopped and quickly...

I love the idea of the wonderful combination of Zanzibari Prawns and Spinach Dhal, in fact I've copied so many recipes into my books, I don't know quite where to start, but I will be blogging as I go. There'll be no stopping me once I know my moong from my channa dhal...

Anyway, go buy. It's brilliant and has induced an almost insatiable need to get cooking.