Welcome to my website. I am the author of ‘Vietnamese – Simple Vietnamese Food To Cook At Home’. I am a photographer and film maker. You can book into my supper club, Vietnamese cooking classes, buy my book, check out my photography and lots more here.
Please follow me on instagram @loveleluu – Thank you so much for visiting x
The supper club is held in my home in London Fields, Hackney. It is like a dinner party in the tradition of a Vietnamese feast with homemade Vietnamese food.
My kitchen is the central station to everything that I do in life, work and love. Every cook will say its the beating heart, the soul and spirit of the home. My kitchen, “My Vietnamese Kitchen” serves a supper club (or two) every weekend; Vietnamese cooking classes on most Saturdays and during the week it becomes a photographic studio for food photography shoots and the home ec work station of shoots elsewhere. It works every day, all the time.
When I can have it back to it just being mine, I lovingly clean every nook and cranny with the calm, stillness and solitude I sometimes crave so much. The times when I can quietly enjoy making fresh pasta, fresh bread, ragu for the week/ the freezer, a roast dinner or a simple fried egg on toast is heavenly. It is when I can just breathe and feel grateful for the pleasures of such simplicities like being at home, in the kitchen.
My kitchen had always been upstairs in my “live” unit but it was high time I dug out my credit card and build a new one downstairs in my “work” unit. I just don’t know how I did it before, all those years of climbing those stairs and the kitchen not having unity with the dinning room! It was insane! But I had to cope with it, as I could never afford to build a new kitchen!
I now have a beautiful range cooker with 2 ovens and a grill! Plus somewhere to store all my trays and baking tins! All the space on top means I can use it as a work surface as well as a cooking surface and a plating surface! It is like a dream come true to be able to make 2 different things in the ovens and not having to wait. Or to make use of the two and get things baking for the masses (of supper clubbers).
I can actually have my massive stockpot on the stove and still able to use all the rings! How did I ever do it before?
The fridge is my other most favourite and most useful thing. I can now store all the food in there because it is so big, its like a room in itself! All the food I have to get for the supper club, cooking classes and the photo shoots can all live in there til its needed. Whats also great about it is that it keeps my herbs and vegetables really crisp and fresh – which means it lasts longer too.
I am a very lucky girl indeed!
Not forgetting to mention: do you know how many tea towels I have to wash on a daily basis? Probably 30 a day! So Beko gave me a brilliant integrated washing machine which lets me do quick washes at the temperatures I want and I have a little countdown too, so I know how much time I have to do other things, like relaxing upstairs.
And I can not live without a dishwasher! I do do a lot of the washing up by hand because I need to use something again pretty quickly but for plates, glasses and cutlery – I must put those in because there is nothing else like a clean feel of glass and tableware. I love clean! I also love playing the game of how much you can stack in the dishwasher.
Building a new kitchen from scratch is not something that was done lightly. As anyone whose ever done any DIY or renovating knows, it can be the most stressful of times. Dust and dirt everywhere, having nowhere to be, stuff all over the place… and the builder never turning up on time, then leaving straight away (probably to another job) and promising you fake hopes of the light at the end of the tunnel… I ended up doing most of the redecorating and getting my hands dirty. It turned out well in the end but the stress that came with it was no joy and my pockets were full of holes. I learnt valuable lessons.
Always get a builder whose not a grumpy sod.
Always get everything in writing.
Never pay anyone by the day.
They never deliver when they say they will deliver – especially when everything else is reliant on it.
You always need more grout than it says on the packaging.
The list goes on….
Supper Club time!
I had a beautiful dinning room before (without the new kitchen) full of old things and furniture from when I had boutiques. I loved the things and the memories they gave me. The huge Victorian cabinet was the shop counter for many years when I enjoyed wrapping presents for customers like Kiera Knightley, Katie Holmes, James McAvoy to John Malkovich; where I laughed and danced with my friends but it was time for new memories to be made, one with this new kitchen of mine.
Thank you so much to Leisure & Beko for my wonderful appliances. Thank you Thank you Thank you!
Since then, I have filmed a few recipes for Leisure Range Cookers which I will share in another blog post.
My little cubby office
A place to set up all the food scenes as well as enjoying a lovely lunch.
Me with lots of makeup on! Please follow me on instagram @loveleluu for all the joys that comes from this kitchen.