Every good jam tart deserves the finest preserve.
While studying art and design at Central Saint Martins, I went round supermarkets taking photos of shoppers and their baskets: the game was to match people with their food. For an architectural project, I made a scale model of a shop out of gingerbread rather than foam and added icing and sweets very colourfully.
A sandwich needn't be loaded with bacon or ham to make it a serious feast.
Nothing could be more French than pastry.
But understanding the complexities of the ramen menu is an equally tricky feat for a foreigner. Both regional and stylistic variations apply to each menu. Add to that the spin that each particular ramen chef puts on his dish, and you rarely know what you are going to get.
True to his Malay Chinese heritage, my dad would regularly whip up a revitalising spicy broth in the depths of winter. He was a firm believer that spicy food is the solution to most problems, and feeling under the weather was no exception.
While we Brits love a curry, the French get their spicy kicks from the culinary traditions bestowed by their North African population.
I would try and barter a cake for some help with coding. I'm not the best coder. I have some basic HTML but that's about it.
Forget sushi, yakitori and tempura, ramen is what really gets the Japanese excited.
To follow my meal, I'd drink a glass of my uncle's homemade apricot schnapps. He puts it in beautiful glass bottles and sells it at his local market in Austria. You don't normally drink with Asian food, so this would be a fitting end to the meal.
Back in my school days, when I would scuttle off with a cheese roll, an apple, a box of Sun-Maid raisins and a Penguin bar, my packed lunches were reassuringly predictable. And I liked it that way.
Education in Bavaria is tough. You fail sports, you have to repeat the year.
Rubbing meat or vegetables with sweet and savoury spices before roasting or sizzling on a grill is what summer nights are all about.
Eating wantan mee in Malaysia is my earliest memory. The street sellers there have a whole cooking set-up on the front of their bikes.
I'm always looking for a way to get some spice into my cooking but, generally, the French don't like spicy food.
I had quite a few jobs in Paris before hitting the jackpot and writing cookbooks. One of them was peeling vegetables and prepping other veggie delights at Bob's Juice Bar.
As a woman you have to tick all these boxes to be able to be on TV. I know I look a certain way and that's partly why I'm on TV. If I were really ugly and fat, I don't think I'd have had the same chance.
Fig season is a joyous time of year for me. Back in my Paris days, the markets would be filled with piles of these squidgy fruit, no doubt sent up from the sunny south where they grow in abundance.
With patisserie, unlike with cooking, you have to be very precise; you can't just add a bit of this and a bit of that, because your cake starts melting. There's a lot of technique involved, but you can still be creative. Because of my artistic background, when I have that freedom I tend to do things a little bit out of the box.
Ramen is Japanese soul food, appealing to old and young, rich and poor.
