While the book was being got ready for the press, the excitement  kept me going, but by September of last year it was clear that my heart problems needed urgent and fairly drastic intervention. In mid-October, I had a quadruple heart bypass, performed by a brilliant young woman professor of cardiac surgery. I was in hospital for only a week and within a surprisingly short time was on my feet again. More than six months later, I can't say I feel fully recovered, but I am leading an active life, and intend to go on doing so. Watch this space!

 
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.

Here, you can see the satay sauce on the left. To the right of it,  top, is an oval plate of a cooked salad of bean sprouts, with a few lightly-boiled green beans and julienned carrot to give it some colour. Right of that, a blue bowl with fried krupuk or prawn crackers, which are like the 'shrimp slices' you get in Chinese restaurants, but larger, pinker, and more tasty. Bottom row: another cooked salad of sliced green sweet peppers, more bitter melon, and green beans. Nearest the camera, a big bowl of plain boiled rice (Thai jasmine: this is the nearest I can find in England to the Sumatran and Javanese rices that I was brought up on).

You can see now that it might take six hungry people quite a while to get through that lot, especially as we were all talking the whole time! And what about dessert? you ask. Well, one of my Indonesian guests brought with her a huge dish of tiramisu, and that made us very happy. Tiramisu is popular, I think, all over Asia, and especially in Japan - indeed, some (non-Japanese) people think 'tiramisu' is a Japanese word. In fact, of course, it's Italian - for me, further proof that Italy and Indonesia have much in common, foodwise anyway - and it goes beyond pasta and noodles.

I remind you that you can find the peanut sauce recipe in my Recipes section. I'll be adding recipes for more of these dishes quite soon.

One restaurant I have to mention is Gigetto. It's in a small town called Miane, on the road from Vittorio Veneto to Valdobbiadene. (Even if you don't speak Italian, you score points with friends there if you pronounce that name with the stress in the right place - it's val-do-BYA-de-ne.) This road is so fascinating that it deserves a page to itself: it winds between, around, occasionally up onto, the steep foothills of the Dolomites, often with sweeping views towards the plain and the sea - from one or two high spots, on a clear day, you should be able to see the towers of Venice. These hills are almost completely given over to the cultivation of the prosecco grape, and most of their inhabitants seem to make a good living from it, as growers or winemakers.

Fittingly, Gigetto offers not only excellent food but a magnificent cellar, a catacomb of wine that wriggles away under the various small and large dining-rooms of the restaurant and out, by my reckoning, beneath the roots of the vines and deep into the hillside. On the website that I linked to above, you can see a picture of just one little corner, twist, or possibly dead-end, in this labyrinth of a cellar, its walls lined and its floor stacked high with fine vintages, wines from all over the world, brandies, grappa, single-malt Scotch from every distillery, it seems to go on and on...

Here I am, choosing fish (with some help from a Venetian friend who is also a cookery teacher) among the stone columns of the fish market. And look at these chillies and artichokes - I don't think I've ever seen stuff as good as this in England.

But soon it was lunch time ... A friend had given me the name of a small restaurant called Vecio Fritolin, and the street address. Except that there aren't any street addresses in Venice; the city is divided into six segments, called sestriere, and in  each sestier the buildings are simply numbered 1,2,3 .. up to however many there are - usually over 2000. After asking various shopkeepers, and their assistants and customers and passers-by (in Venice, everyone joins in), and after an outburst of mild panic in case we missed lunch altogether, we found it ... but don't ask me to find my way there again. I can only assure you it is well worth the effort, and the fun, of re-discovery (in the Calle della Regina). It's in a long tradition of Venetian fried fish restaurants, and both the setting and the cooking are quietly perfect.

These soft-shell crabs might perhaps have been the same ones that I'd watched, an hour or two earlier, scrambling hopefully around on a market stall while they waited for someone to buy them. The man who was selling them just picked them up in handfuls, like wriggling chestnuts, and popped them into a bag. Roger went for the mixed fried fish, which actually arrived on a sheet of paper, just as they were served in the old days for people to take away and eat in the street.
 

 Of course, this means I need self-catering accommodation with a good kitchen. My husband Roger and I are lucky enough to know the family of wine producers who, two or three years ago, opened a foresteria - literally, 'a house in the woods', though really it's set among rolling hills that are covered in vineyards. This is the region of prosecco grapes and the light, sparkling wines that are made from them. The foresteria is an old stone building that once belonged to the Cistercians of an abbey somewhere in the district; its new owners have made it into a welcoming place, with spacious rooms, well-equipped kitchens, all mod. con., swimming pool etc. - and wonderful views. It's on a hillside above a tiny village called Rolle, where the  church clock always strikes the hour twice, in case you forgot to count the first time.

Just a little to the right  of the church in the picture is a restaurant I particularly like, even though it's unassumning, modestly priced, and usually crowded. In fact, it's usually full of friendly people thoroughly enjoying themselves, so what higher recommendation could you have? It's called Al Monastero di Rolle - just Monastero for short - perhaps for the Cistercians, though the atmosphere is totally unlike any monastery I have ever imagined. It operates on two floors; downstairs, one corner of the room is taken up by a great open range, in which the fire is always blazing while the spit turns before it. Upstairs, the same cheerful atmosphere but without the fire. The menu is fixed, so you have no problems choosing; the only problem is to eat all the food that is put before you. There are always two or three antipasti, then of course the primi, the pasta dishes, then the secondo, the main course, and finally the dolce, if you think you can face  another mouthful. The house wine is good local stuff, and at the end you will be offered a generous mouthful of grappa at no charge. Four of us ended up paying 30 euros / £21 / US$40 each for what was, in effect, a real old-fashioned Italian nobleman's feast, after which we retired to bed and slept soundly for eight hours. Be warned: Chef gets quite worried if anyone refuses a course merely because they 'aren't hungry'. The main course changes each night: Wednesday it's a grill, Thursday fish from the Adriatic, Friday a whole roast pig, and so on. Monday they're closed, and Tuesday they open only for a pre-booked party of at least 20. To arrive at Rolle after driving all day along the crowded autostrada, say hello to the staff at the foresteria and settle in, then trundle down to the Monastero for supper, is better than coming home - all the good feeling, and you don't even have to cook.

The other restaurant in Rolle, to the left of the church, is more conventional and more expensive, but also very good, well worth visiting at least once while you're in that rather remote, unspoiled corner of Italy - unspoiled (so far) because it's a protected area, where permission to develop property is hard to get.

 Well, that's enough for today - tomorrow, a few memories of Venice herself....