My Favourite Dish: Sandy Tang

"Growing up, I ate a variety of foods, but mostly Asian tinged with Portuguese. My mum would make beef stuffed with enoki mushrooms in teriyaki sauce; classic steamed fish with spring onion and ginger; boiled bacalhau (salt cod) with potatoes and vegetables drizzled with olive oil – very Portuguese; maybe serradura as a pudding, a layered dessert with cream and crumbled Marie biscuits (similar to rich tea) – another very Portuguese dish.

"We ate together every night for dinner. But the highlight was always Sunday brunch in a teahouse, sometimes with extended family – lots of gossip, all kinds of dim sum (siu mai, har gau, char siu bao, custard tarts). That’s part of the motivation behind Journey to the West.

"My mum never allowed me in the kitchen, she was very territorial. So I couldn't do much more than fry an egg. I only learned to cook after I came to the UK.

"Because Britain wasn’t famous for its cuisine at the time, especially in the Kent town where I lived, when I started to cook, I naturally gravitated towards wanting to make the food I missed from home. But I also learned to make classic roast dinners, which in many ways are the equivalent of the dim sum brunches.

"The dish I’m hankering after right now is Laghman from north west China, although I believe it might have originated in the Laghman province of Afghanistan. The noodles are hand-pulled wheat noodles, glossy, bouncy and fat, a little chewy with a firm bite, served with a cumin braised lamb, red pepper and tomato-based sauce. (Sometimes it’s made with beef, also good.) It’s simple and hearty but special to me because it’s the only dish I could finish myself when travelling solo through north-west China. I should be tired of it by now, but no. I’ve had varieties of it in the Gobi desert, in the Altai mountains, and Turpan, which is the real home of the dish.

"When I’m lazy, I’ll use passata instead of tomatoes and that actually releases a more intense flavour. The locals like to hold a clove of raw garlic to bite into between mouthfuls of the noodles. I never really appreciated that – it’s too much even for me – but you can add some garlic to the stir-fry to get something more appetising."

Make Sandy's laghman recipe.