Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery

I discovered Ken Hom at the same time as Madhur Jaffrey and was going through my Asian cusine stage. It was the mid 1980's and I was living in London as a young girl in my twenties. I was intoxicated by Chinatown, having grown up in Lincolnshire I had never seen anything like it before. It was vibrant and the food was outstanding. I could walk for hours in Gerrard Street, admiring all of the ducks hanging up in the windows, the smell of hot woks and the bustling Asian supermarkets. Have you ever found anything that smells the same as Chinese mushrooms? To me they catapult me back to Chinatown and those heady days. I followed Ken Hom's series on TV religiously and this book showed me that I could cook chinese food at home. It was fun and at one stage I would only eat chinese food. The only rules are you must prepare all of your ingredients in advance as cooking tends to be a frantic affair but I still have the rice cooker I bought at the time, it has been a great investment and cooking rice has never been so easy. If you eat quite a bit of rice then buy one it will transform your life and they last forever. I don't use the book much now, nor cook much Chinese food, which seems a shame after my love affair with it all those years ago. I am looking forward to re-acquainting myself with it