A few days ago, another dinner party - this time among my guests were some of the trustees of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. I have been a trustee myself for the past year, and it was partly a welcome dinner for a trustee who lives abroad and had come to visit Oxford and London for a few days. Naturally we talked about next year's Symposium, which will be held on 8 and 9 September 2007. We agreed that we should tell as many of our friends as possible about the dates and the theme for this Symposium - you'll find all the details on the website. At the moment I'm just starting to test new recipes for my forthcoming book on Indonesian food. So I took this opportunity to serve my foodie guests with some of my planned recipes. I started the menu with an old Indonesian recipe made with tofu (beancurd). The Javanese name for this dish is gadon tahu, and traditionally it is cooked wrapped in banana leaf. But for this dinner I cooked the tofu mixture in individual ramekins. I won't go into all the details of the menu, but I was rather pleased with the soup I made for my guests, and I asked them to tell me what its two main ingredients were. All I would say was that the soup combined one fruit and one vegetable.

 
The prize for the person who gave the correct answer would be one of my published books. I like to serve this soup in coffee cups; it is spiced very lightly with the seeds of one green cardamon, a pinch of mustard seed, and a teaspoon of chopped ginger. I took a quick snap of one of the cups before I served them. The green bits on the top are chopped Chinese chive. Each of the five guests tasted the soup as if it had been a fine wine, and each gave a different answer to my question. I wasn't surprised when the only correct answer - parsnip and apple - came from one whose day job is as a consultant engineer in the oil industry, but who spends most of his spare time in his garden, growing fine and unusual vegetables and fruit - like this splendid turban squash, for example, that he brought me as a present.

 Of course I wasn't surprised when he said he would wait for my new Indonesian Food Book for his prize. I do hope now that I can meet the deadline for the delivery of the manuscript, and that the publisher will publish it in the autumn of 2008. Naturally I won't print any of the 'new' recipes in this weblog, but I will talk about the book and print some snippets of the text from time to time to whet my readers' appetites. As well as recipes, there will be plenty of background material about social and cultural life in Indonesia, and other interesting stories about some of the unusual ingredients.