Thai Pork Salad

When I was a young newspaper reporter, I decided I would like to learn how to lay out pages in the newspaper. This was back in the 1960s when women were barely tolerated in the newsroom let along on the "subs' bench" which was occupied by an august collection of middle-aged male sub-editors. It was their job to go through all the stories for the paper, assigning them to pages, sifting through the words for grammatical indiscretions, sense, possible libel, accuracy and a dozen other little things.

Some of these men were very pedantic and woe betide the young - and not so young - journalist who transgressed the rules.

The chief sub in those days certainly wasn't going to let me perch on the bench - certainly not when he was around, anyway. And so I had to resort to subterfuge. His deputy, who ruled the roost in the boss's absence, agreed to take me on board on a Saturday when the boss was on the bowling green.

One of my reporting colleagues had been helping out doing a food page called "Cooking with Mary Anne" and it was decided he could teach me the basics. A straight three columns had to be filled and there were many recipes and photos to choose from. I was in my element.

At first I peppered the page with as many typefaces as I could find on the chart. But I soon learned that looked a mess - less was more and was definitely classier.

I graduated on to the "cable page" or overseas news and managed to make myself reasonably useful about the place. Eventually I ended up as features editor with several pages a day under my control. The chief sub no longer seemed to mind having me around.

The colleague who had handed over his Mary Anne page to me went on to do greater things and ended up running his own communications company and I moved into corporate relations work. I engaged him to produce a corporate video and we met a couple of times over lunch to discuss the project. It was he who introduced me to Thai food in a little restaurant in Auckland - a stone's throw from where I had spent a couple of years imprisoned at boarding school, but that's another story.

My first taste of Thai was a meat and salad dish called Laab (also seen as larp, larb and laap). I just had to try it, my friend suggested. I did and, like him, I was hooked. I have made it many times since and it is one of the family's favourite Thai dishes and particularly nice on a summer evening.

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