Celestial Peach 🍑 Jenny Lau

We built together and we ate together. The theme of the annual Banana Leaf Rice Banquet is always ‘Rice Killer’. Thank you ☺️ @lockdownlunchclub @baboyclub @leonajjacob @lavendelllllllll @idk_office @farrokh.aman @thisplacetastesdelicious @hollow_legs @swilipino @rangoonsisters @hailinleung @angelahuii @angiehu.xyz @yicraftslondon @glyphor @dumplingsbypaula @supasue @suscottfood @clotildiclo @kitchen__pan @jennie.loh @jcho_11 @family_feasting @foodconniesseur @pollychan_bakehouse @onceatourist @mokalash @cymbalhands @mahamrifood @kim_songsoo @matchasundays @louisezazie @abby_lee_chef @loveleluu @terri_mercieca Community makes my life complete 🩷❤️🧡💛💜💙🩵💚🤎🤍🩶🖤

🙋🏻‍♀️ I got a great question about what work I choose to accept, so I’m sharing how over the past six years I have essentially created my own framework for ‘work’. (Written* on the back of an unpaid bill 😬.) Pivoting out of a career job into a slashie life – which combines creativity, collaboration and community, all with a sense of purpose – has given me great satisfaction. 1️⃣ First, I want to interrogate what we define as work: I used to dismiss anything that didn’t earn money as ‘not work’, but this is simply not true, especially when you consider all the volunteers, community workers, artists, stay-at-home mothers etc. who still earn zilch for their labour. Work, for me = meaningful output. 2️⃣ Secondly, though this all seems chaotic, I actively chose this path and have cultivated a lifestyle that supports it. It’s NOT for everyone. But since many people still query ‘what EXACTLY do you do?’ and also ask how to start their own projects here is how it looks in my head. Also – ask ANY freelancer and they will often have a ‘job’ that looks like this. 3️⃣ Thirdly, I’ve seen our community champions be taken advantage of because they give their heart and soul but don’t ask for money. Don’t take people for granted just because they are generous 😡! Bills are bills, and people need to be paid. Do you have any other questions? Thoughts? Leave a comment ⬇️ *forgot to add arrows to the axes; NB they are sliding scales)

The second Rice & Friends, May 2026. @rojak.ldn & @mexicanfoodmemories @spill.by.erica & @celestialpeach_uk in support of @eseacc_luncheon_club @eseacommunitycentre . 🍚 A monthly Thursday dinner cooked by friends of the community. Everyone eats the same: rice, three mains, soup of the day and a snack for £20. We fed fifty guests, with strong turnout from the @fourwindsmahjong massive 🀄 Menu: frijoles charros, 地三鲜 ‘three treasures of the earth’, Nyonya chicken curry, ‘lo mai gai’ arancini, toasted milk cake with chocolate and caramelised banana, hot & sour soup. ⭐ volunteers: @supasue @jcho_11 @wattywal8 @jennie.loh @metaasianbaby @yanma.hiya DATE CHANGE FOR YOUR DIARIES! 18th June is the next one - chef line up will be 🤌🏽, the mahjong tables will be opened and we may even have some stand-up comedy!

Nice photos and rare sightings of me out at night - mostly not in an apron. A trade off for long hours of standing in the last month (AKA why my hip and lower back hates me 😩) 1️⃣2️⃣ Deploying Judge Jenny face™️ at the inaugural @opentableuki Restaurant Awards, of which I had the privilege of being a judge 👩🏻‍⚖️. Wearing the @sumlondon_ Martial Arts Tracksuit Jacket (inspired by Ip Man!) and Jia You 加油 t-shirt. With the radiant laksa queen @sambalshiok . 3️⃣4️⃣5️⃣ A finalist for Debut Book at the @fortnums Food & Drink Awards ⭐️. Incredible to be recognised amongst a stellar list of nominees. Borrowed the @sumlondon_ Qing denim vest for this one and stole @rangoonsisters Emily for the night 🥰. 6️⃣7️⃣ IYKYK this querying face 🤔... it’s when you go in the walk-in and immediately forget what you’re looking for 💀. Lensed by @stolenoranges , directed by @cookinboots , for the new @cafejikoni at @vam_east . Spot me on display in the cafe! With @philkhoury for scale 🍫.

💚 Mugwort cha guo/艾葉茶果 exchange 💭 musings. @eseacommunitycentre ’s aunty Judy and aunty Mooi gave me some homegrown mugwort. In return, I promised homemade Hakka ‘tea cakes’ 🥰. Mugwort, in Traditional Chinese Medicine, is a ‘heating’ bitter herb that dispels dampness and is beneficial for women’s reproductive systems. It can be foraged in London if you know where to look... but a lot of our resourceful, green-fingered elders grow their own. What I appreciate about being at the community centre is that every day there are these non-transactional and cyclical exchanges of care – simple things that money can’t buy, like a popo’s garden grown veg. So I transformed their gift into these chewy rice cakes with a savoury mung bean & shallot paste filling. Though laborious and ‘old-fashioned’, I know they’ll taste familiar and comforting to the elders. I have so much respect for anyone who preserves and educates on ‘dying’ crafts – like @thewayofkueh – even if preservation means reiteration and respectful reinvention at small scale, one cake at a time. Just because something is complex doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy doing it! Furthermore it’s somewhat sad that the younger generation is not so plugged in to ancestral herbalism/horticulture and its direct relationship to our health and to nature. So many of the answers to modern society’s ills are staring us in the face... our ancestors hold the key. It’s on us to make the most of what we’ve been handed. 🔑

One week to go until Rice & Friends and it's time to reveal the menu. 🇲🇽 @mexicanfoodmemories is stirring up a big pot of frijoles charros (contains pork, vegan version available) 🇸🇬 @rojak.ldn is bringing the Nyonya chicken curry (halal) 🇸🇬 @spill.by.erica is baking toasted milk cake with chocolate and caramelised banana cream 🍑🇨🇳 I'm making 'three treasures of the earth' (vegan) There'll be soup of the day (pork-free) and rice, always. Support these brilliant chefs, who are supporting @eseacommunitycentre @eseacc_luncheon_club by cooking for you lucky people. See you in my inbox and meet you next Thursday! 🥰

Maize – a hardy grain that left the New World to influence cuisines and crops around the world. Sometimes things make so much sense. Like, why wouldn’t I mash up Chinese wowotou / 窩窩頭 with Latin American humitas? The former, a Northern-style steamed cornmeal and jujube cornbread. The latter, a steamed parcel of freshly ground corn kernels, queso fresco and spices. The delicious humitas from my neighbours @tottuslatinshopuk have saved me on many a hungry morning. 🎍🌽 I used one bamboo leaf wrapper – better known for its zongzi / 粽子 application – and one corn husk – which I pestered my veg seller to give to me to dry and hoard all last summer. 🧀 Inside: fresh corn, harina de maiz, butter, eggs, sugar, jujube, mozzarella. 🫔 Wrapping method 1️⃣: zongzi style. 2️⃣: humita style. Both work. 🤩 Result: wonderful, obvious synthesis... Read the last chapter Z is for Zongzi in my book An A-Z of Chinese Food for further cross-cultural musings!

Received a bar of ‘My Sweet Honeycomb Queen’ in the goody bag at the @fortnums Food & Drink Awards. Each bar has a custom melody composed by @mcassomusic , printed within the wrapper. Obviously I had to give it a whirl. 🎶 @jasmine.meadenmusic

A 💯- themed banquet fit for a century of @wednesdays_fun ! It was my honour to cook for Wednesdays’ 100th event, London’s legendary hump day dining club. I had great fun designing a menu around the playful puns and importance of ‘one hundred’ in Chinese culture. 🥚We began with century egg gildas alongside my pao cai pickles, a whipped smoked tofu-feta dip and fish fragrant baba ganoush. 🍗 Star of the show was the ‘vanishing dish’ 百花雞 ‘Hundred Flower Chicken’ - whole skin meticulously removed from chickens and stuffed with a bouncy prawn paste. Steamed, historically sprinkled with edible chrysanthemum petals (白花, ‘white flower’, homonym for ‘hundred flower’) that are infused with delicate savouriness. Thank you @hgwalter for the generous gift. 🍲 Rest of the chicken went into a slow boiled broth with a rhizome power move (ginger, lemongrass, galangal, makrut lime leaf), jujubes and longan. ‘1000 cut chrysanthemum tofu’ was slowly revealed as the soup was served. 🥬 白菜 / cabbage is a homonym for ‘100 wealth’. Steamed here with mung bean vermicelli, my fermented chilli and black bean sauce, topped with crispy rice noodles and ikan bilis. 🐠 Whole turbot, fresh from Brixham Market the day before, was steamed with a savoury sauce of my 3 year old fermented mustard greens, ham and tomatoes. These chonkers were so generously sponsored by @therockfishuk . 🍚 Hidden Treasure Rice brimmed with dried mushrooms, a house X.O. sauce and my home cured lap yuk. @___christy found the one red egg (a birthday tradition) that I hid in the rice and she receives luck all year round 🎉 🍑 Finally petit fours - a peach and nata de coco hunkwe jelly (for longevity), kueh lapis / 千層糕 (‘1000 layer cake’) in Wednesdays colours and mochi-stuffed jujube with osmanthus ginger syrup. @shellbakeryy baked a beautiful cake, @drinkjinjin served welcome drinks and we finished the night with @mingriver_europe baijiu shots. Thank you to @eseacommunitycentre for letting us celebrate in your space, and to my ⭐️ MVP volunteers @jcho_11 @surajkarma . Couldn’t have done it without you!

Join us for a special night celebrating community and food with a curated selection of short films by ESEA Film Night and Joe of Food & Film Club (please reach out for WhatsApp details for the film club if QR code doesn’t scan!) as part of ESEACC’s Food & Community Programme as organised by @celestialpeach_uk , aka Jenny Lau. A final selection of films will be sent out at a later date, but please anticipate plenty of foodie goodness! This is a fundraiser to keep ESEACC alive for the community, and such we recommend you bring a £5 minimum donation! Please donate either as part of your Eventbrite ticket, or send us confirmation of a direct donation to the centre via DM (or donate at the door!) What else do you need to bring? Bring snacks for a pre-film potluck (we’ll have plenty of snacks too, including popcorn and tea) and some fruit to peel for a communal post-film fruit peeling and chit-chat. Jenny will be providing some light catering on-theme with our films (with the help of the wonderful @swilipino providing kare kare bowls). Doors (& Potluck): 6pm Films: from 7pm (at least 1 hour of programming with additional time for food breaks!) Ends: by 9pm When: Weds 20th May, 6pm Tickets: /e/esea-film-night-food-film-club-food-film-food-film-tickets-1988513741129

What a night. Safe to say, Wednesdays 100th event was our BEST EVENT EVER!! Jenny Lau cooked up an absolute monster banquet. Prawn stuffed in chicken skin, steamed whole turbot, thousand cut tofu, and petit fours with her signature 🍑 Anddd Wednesdays member Shell blew us away us with her signature Mango Sago cake 🍰 🥭 As promised there were not one, but FOUR speeches (and a poem hehe), a limited edition T-shirt designed by our wickedly talented friend Nandal and a delicious welcome drink by our friends at JIN JIN. The BAIJIU wave wasn’t in the script, but after doing 100 of these events… you learn to improv a little 😆 Thank you to Jess Suraj Shell May and Jenny for being the dream team on this event. Thank you Mitch, Christy and Nivraj for loving Wednesdays so much. Thank you to all our members for coming out, night after night and making us all FEEL ALIVE. Here’s to a century of events done and another century more 🥂 💙 💯 @celestialpeach_uk @eseacommunitycentre @jcho_11 @surajkarma @shellbakeryy @mayc.lee @nandal_seo @drinkjinjin

🌸 𝑴𝒂𝒚 🌸 your month ahead be filled with good food, sunshine and connection! Here’s everything coming up at @eseacommunitycentre as part of our mid-week food & community programme. FULLY BOOKED 🥟 @taotaojulondon are sending a delegation of dim sum queens to school us in their craft 💪🏽 and donating all time and £ back to us 🙇🏻‍♀️ 🍚 @mexicanfoodmemories @spill.by.erica @rojak.ldn join us for the next Rice & Friends 🎞️ A special @esea.filmnight x Food & Film Club collab, potluck, fruit circle and @swilipino ’s kare kare on theme 👀 👦🏻👶🏼🧒🏽👧🏾 It’s half term and we want to feed your family. Special kids’ Happy Meal (no 🍟 included) and prices @eseacc_luncheon_club all week and after lunch family activities 🪏🪴🫜 CORRECTION slide 8 should be 12:30PM Thanks to all the volunteers, staff, sponsors and participants for making this such a lively and meaningful community centre!