An Oxfordshire chef who specialises in Asian food is inviting us all to spice up our diets yet still cut down on the calories during these dreary winter days.

Azad Hussain, at The Vine and Spice, in Long Wittenham, has come up with a tasty, yet low-calorie menu, after speaking to one of his customers who was about to embark on a boring post-festive diet.

Azad, who has worked as chief chef at this innovative restaurant since it opened more than a year ago, said: “Most Asian restaurants don’t do healthy food and I immediately saw a gap in the market.”

Actually, Azad admitted that he has always avoided using a lot of oil in his cooking — now all he had to do was take it a little further to enable customers to cut down the calories.

One of the other things that Azad takes seriously is the cooking time. “I have always tried to keep my food as natural as possible. This means less cooking. Nothing I serve is stewed for hours and hours. It is served as fresh as possible and therefore full of nutrients.”

To prove this, Azad took me into his spotlessly clean kitchen at the back of the restaurant to demonstrate his cooking skills and show me just how he gets the best from his ingredients.

As he said, Asian restaurant food has come a long way since we battled through steaming hot bowls of chicken vindaloo so chilli-hot it was painful to eat — offering nothing but heat and more heat. Now the spices are used sparingly, subtle flavours predominate and a fragrant, yet spicy, aroma, invites you to eat.

First Azad prepared machli dum, which is one of several dishes designed for those looking for fewer calories. He then went on to cook two other dishes that appear on this special menu, hariyali machli and handi tarkari.

Machli dum called for the ubiquitous banana leaf, which seemes to appear on most of Azad’s dishes, even if only to highlight the colour of his food when set on an attractive white dish. He assured me that we can all buy in a stock of banana leaves by visiting the Asian shops in the Cowley Road, or any well-stocked Thai food store.

Azad weighs nothing; his eyes and his fingers measure the various spices he adds with such precision that watching him prepare this dish was a real joy. His careful handling of his ingredients was impressive, too; it was as if everything he was adding to a meal was greatly respected. This gentle style of cooking is quite unlike anything seen on the television where celebrity chefs manhandle their ingredients as they battle against the clock to get a dish finished.

Yes, Azad does use a little oil when creating his low-calorie dishes, but so little it hardly counts. As he explained, certain spices needed to be cooked briskly in a little hot oil to bring out their flavours.

When showing me how to cook handi tarkari — a delicious vegetable dish created from broccoli, cauliflower, courgettes, red peppers and baby corn, into which are tossed red onions and whole spices — he began by blanching the chopped vegetables in boiling salted water. He then spooned the blanched vegetables into a frying pan containing just enough hot oil to burst the little spice seeds and release their flavours.

When spooning the blanched vegetables on to the cooked spices, he didn’t strain them first, but allowed the water that adhered to them to fall into the pan too. He then tossed in a couple of spoonfuls of the cooking liquid and gave the vegetables a stir. Indeed, that is all there is to this dish, so simple to make, and only containing the merest suggestion of oil. It was finished in just a couple of minutes.

Having been invited to taste the dishes he had cooked at the end of the session, I can tell you that I found this was absolutely delicious, as the vegetables were still slightly crisp and aromatic.

Azad began cooking in Bangladesh and has been living in the UK since 1983. Although he knew how to cook Asian dishes, he felt it was important to attend a British cookery school and so took his basic City and Guild certificates at the Westminster Catering College, in London. He then extended his knowledge by making frequent visits to India, to seek out authentic recipes he could add to his repertoire. The Spice and Vine menu is not extensive. This is quite deliberate. Azad is convinced that, though small, his menu offers something for everyone. Besides, he is quite happy to cook a special dish of any customer’s choosing if given enough notice. You will find The Vine and Spice in the centre of the beautiful little South Oxfordshire village of Long Wittenham. For further details you can go to: www.thevineandspice.co.uk