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Fantastic Vietnamese food in London, the ideal sausage, healthy oil, the secrets of a perfect cuppa, new ways with oats and more...By Jo Hill.

Real flavours of Vietnam... in London
Really good food at reasonable prices isn’t always that easy to find in London – and the ethnic route is often the best bet. This couldn’t be more so at Viet Grill, one of a burgeoning number of Vietnamese restaurants in Shoreditch (ideal for those visiting London on the train, as it’s near both Liverpool Street and King’s Cross).

The restaurant has recently been redecorated in a colonial style with leafy wallpaper, lanterns and Buddha statuettes. The menu is totally alluring. We enjoyed exciting dishes such as Lotus Stem Salad with shredded pork, shrimps, Vietnamese basil, peanuts and lime zest (£7, left), five-spice beef fillet, charcoal grilled, served with soy sauce (£7), oven-baked mackerel marinated in lemongrass and wrapped in banana leaves (£9) and the wonderful Viet Quail Curry, with aubergine, crunchy okra, coconut and spicy Viet An sauce (£8). Visit www.vietnamesekitchen.co.uk or book on 020 7739 6686; follow Viet Grill on twitter

Photographs: Jason Lowe

Know your oats
Porridge and flapjacks... those are the things that immediately spring to mind at the word oats, but a recent event organised by www.allaboutoats.com really opened my eyes to other possibilities. Chef Nick Nairn was on hand to rustle up a range of very tempting recipes, including salmon with an oat crust, Nick’s take on cranachan and savoury muffins and Oaty Mince Crumble – a brilliant midweek family supper. To make this, just preheat the oven to 200°C, gas mark 6 then place 500g mince and 1 large chopped onion in a large saucepan and fry for 5 minutes. Add 3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 100ml water and seasoning and fry for a further 5 minutes, covered. Transfer to an ovenproof serving dish. Rub 75g butter into 125g flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in 75g regular or jumbo rolled oats and 75g  grated mature Cheddar cheese, season to taste. Sprinkle over the mince and bake for 20-25 minutes. Serve with fresh vegetables. View a video of the All About Oats summit on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/hgcawholegrain#p/u/0/9YzRVbDtWo4

I'm sure you all know how good oats are for you, but if you don’t: they are low GI and help to control blood sugar, they are a great aid to weight loss as you feel fuller for longer; oats contain fibre for a healthy digestive system; they contain B vitamins and vitamin E, plus folate and magnesium. Eating oats as part of a diet low in saturated fat can help maintain normal cholesterol levels, while eating just three x 16g servings of oats per day can help reduce the risk of heart disease by up to 30%. Something tells me we should all be trying to up our oat intake!

Which oil is the healthiest?
Seduced by the health benefits of Mediterranean cooking, I bet many of you are thinking olive as you read these words. But you may be surprised to learn that a study by the British Nutrition Foundation found that rapeseed oil has less saturated fat than peanut, soya, olive, sunflower, safflower, flaxseed and sesame oil with just 6.6g saturated fat (olive oil has 14.3g) and is richer in omega 3 and 6 than any other oil. A great choice for cooking, as well as dressings and sauces, it is a flavourless oil that won’t mask other delicate flavours in your cooking. Often sold as vegetable oil (which sounds far too vague and unappealing!) rapeseed oil is one product that will definitely win shelf space in my cupboards from now on. Visit www.hgca.com/nutrition for more info about this hugely underrated oil.

Staying with rapeseed...
We ran a competition on the site a while ago, asking you to send in your recipes using rapeseed oil. I helped to judge the finalist in each category: lovely banana and chocolate chip muffins, Rack of Lamb, Sweet Potato Chips and Garlic Aioli and Chilli Garlic Prawns in Pitta Bread. The overall winner, though, was Cecelia Allen of the Isle of Wight with a lovely oriental-style salad dressing: simply mix together 200ml rapeseed oil, 80ml balsamic vinegar, ½ tsp ground ginger, 100ml dark soy sauce and 1 tbsp honey. It was fantastic with a crunchy salad of 2 large grated carrots, a 300g pack of beansprouts and 2 shredded pak choi.

 PG Tips and the art of making a good cuppa...
The Dorchester Hotel was the swanky venue for a recent event by PG Tips (along with Monkey and his sidekick Al aka Johnny Vegas, actresses Meera Syal and Carol McGriffin providing the obligatory celeb element) as part of their 'How do you describe the taste of a cup of PG Tips tea' campaign. We tasted our way through various PG blends and noted how leaving the tea to brew for longer hugely enhanced the taste (no surprise there!). PG’s taster Nick Brunston gave us his take on the perfect cuppa: freshly drawn water from the tap, add to the cup or mug as soon as it boils, put milk in first if using a teapot, but teabag in first in a mug. It was fascinating to learn that there are 26 components in a PG teabag including Kenyan, Indian and Sri Lankan, and 10,000 teas are tasted each week, all with milk to mimic the consumer’s experience at home. The ideal brewing time? Tasters brew their tea for 6 minutes to allow the full flavour to develop but 2 or 3 minutes is fine. For further information or to submit your description visit www.pgtips.co.uk

London’s only pie-making course
Pastry is my bête noire – I blame it on having warm hands – so I was very keen to go on Marika’s one-day pie-making course at her home in North London. A former member of a punk band that enjoyed some success in the US, Marika is a glamorous, bubbly woman who immediately puts you at your ease. Although the kitchen is small, it can accommodate four people and she soon had us making individual beef and Guinness pies and spiced apple pies (right) as she bopped around the kitchen, tasting, checking and offering useful tips. The pastry was really good: crisp and buttery (and it didn’t fall apart!). I’d highly recommend this course for novice or nervous cooks who want to get to grips with a true British classic. Marika’s father is Greek so she also offers courses in Greek and Mediterranean cookery. The pie-making class was a very reasonable £55 per person, making it ideal for students or young people who want to cook but lack the know-how. Visit www.marikas-kitchen.com

What makes a great sausage?
This was the taxing question at a recent focus group I attended. Having admitted that we all enjoy the guilty pleasure of a sausage sarnie, we got down to basics and argued the toss over what makes a banger sizzlingly good. Real, thin casings, meat with texture, good balance of spicing and herbs, quite a lot of pepper and a ‘home-made’ appearance all got our vote. Interestingly, we all agreed that a sausage needs a fair amount of fat if it’s to be juicy and succulent... yet this can be a problem for manufacturers as any mention of fat on a label can put consumers off. But have you ever tried eating a fat-free sausage: what could be drier?

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