Author: Alex

Spicy Fried Potatoes

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Everyone loves potatoes (don’t they?) but sometimes it’s tricky to do something other than sauté them, mash them, turn them into chips and so on.

Last night I was faced with an Asian style fish dish (recipe to come) that needed an accompaniment. We’d had rice the night before, there were no noodles in the cupboard and we had just two potatoes.

This is a great way to stretch those two potatoes a little further.

Start by taking your potatoes, peeling them and cutting them into approximately 1 cm square cubes. Cook them in boiling water – slightly under is better than slightly over. Drain. You can leave them to cool or not.

Heat a generous tablespoon of ghee in a frying pan. If you have no ghee a combination of butter and a light oil (such as peanut, or a very light olive oil) will do. When the ghee is hot, add a little very finely sliced onion (I used about a quarter of an onion as that’s what I had left over – but if you love onion then a whole one will be fine!) and one clove of garlic, finely chopped. When the onion starts to take on a little colour, add 2 tsp of ground coriander, 1 tsp of ground cumin, about ½ tsp of turmeric and chilli flakes to taste. Fry these spices for a minute or so and then add the potatoes.

Now, this is best done a little in advance because you don’t want to be hurrying the potatoes. You want to get them plenty of frying time so everything gets good and crispy. You don’t have to worry about serving them immediately they look done – they keep hot very nicely. The only problem might be snacking on them while you finish off other things … if you do that you’ll find your potatoes don’t go quite as far as you hoped!

I needed to season the potatoes reasonably generously with salt. I almost never add salt to cooking so my idea of “reasonably generous” is probably nowhere near enough for many people. As always … season to taste.

Serve with whatever you happen to be eating. These would be awesome with any type of curry, or at a BBQ – any meal with robust flavours that can stand up to a bit of chilli. Delicious!

Book Review: Heat

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Mum lent me this book ages ago and it took me a long time to get around to reading it (to be fair, I was reading the mammoth The Wines of Burgundy at the time).

Heat is the autobiographical story of Bill Buford, a food lover – strictly amateur – who managed to score himself a “kitchen slave” position with New York’s Mario Batali. American readers, in particular, will know Batali from the Food Network where he’s on Iron Chef America and is the host of Molto Mario.

Buford began his adventure in an unpaid role, working in Batali’s Babbo restaurant on weekends. It seems like it didn’t take long for him to work his way up to more and more hours and more and more responsibility. He eventually heads off to Italy for various culinary adventures, culminating in spending a lot of time in Tuscany as apprentice to a butcher.

This is an entertaining book and I suspect you have to have more than a passing interest in food to enjoy it, but it is quite a lightweight read. And that’s not a bad thing – this book would make perfect aeroplane material for long haul flights and was a great antidote to the heavyweight (both physically and mentally) book on Burgundy.

One thing that puzzled me throughout the book was the stark absence of any mention of money, or even extended family. Buford mentions his wife a little – especially towards the end when they are in Italy together – but rarely mentions how his forays into the professional kitchen impacted his family’s finances and well being. I don’t know about you, but if I started working weekends in a professional kitchen Andy might have something to say about it – especially if I ended up quitting my job and gallivanting off to Italy. This makes Heat a very personal story because we do find out a lot about how Buford’s experiences changed him, but it’s also an insular story, because we never get a sense of the emotional relationships he has with anyone outside the world of food.

Criticisms aside, this is a perfect book for reading while you’re letting your Christmas dinner settle.

Manee Siam

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Thailand: Bangkok

photo by puuikibeach

date of visit:  Tuesday 25 October 2011

Manee Siam happens to be more or less over the road from a friend’s house so it’s quite a surprise it’s taken us so long to get there. I have to admit that I’ve often wondered whether or not the restaurant is open – one of its street front signs looks unbelievably worn and tattered for an open business … It turns out it is very much open for business and after a bit of a false start (double booking by me – ouch!) we finally made it for a very early (6pm) dinner on a Tuesday night.

Even at this early time we weren’t the first people in the restaurant – another family had beaten us to it! We were quickly settled at our table with proper table linen and high chair and plastic cutlery and crockery thoughtfully provided for the baby.

With a baby in tow there’s not usually very much mucking around when it comes to perusing the menu and choosing food. With beers at hand, we settled on sharing some entrées before the mains. We started with spring rolls and fish cakes which, if we’re being brutally honest, were really nothing special at all. In fact, after the meal we all admitted that we were a little bit worried about the rest of the meal. The fish cakes in particular were the chewy, rubbery type that you can’t help thinking have gone straight from the freezer to the fryer and been just that bit over cooked.

But we all held our disappointment in check and our main courses soon arrived. I had chosen the hot chilli pork: a stir fry with green beans, capsicums, chilli paste and basil. At a ridiculously cheap $12.50 the portion size was perfect and there was plenty of heat from the chilli paste along with sweetness from the basil. The dish wasn’t overloaded with beans or capsicum as a filler and wasn’t drowning in sauce. I was very pleased.

Also at our table we had a beef massaman curry which passed its test with flying colours – especially on the beef tenderness front. And Andy had the seafood combination stir fry with basil which he cheerfully polished off. Both of these dishes came in at just $15 each.

Service was perhaps a little slow – it wasn’t an issue for us because we were dining so early on (although, by the time we left around 7:30pm, quite a few additional parties had arrived) but I can see how this could pose an issue at busier times. For me, the slowness of service was made up for by attentiveness and thoughtfulness: no restaurant yet has brought out dedicated baby friendly tableware and the staff were all friendly and helpful.

Of course, the icing on the cake was how ludicrously cheap and good our meal was. We spent $30 a head, which included a generous tip (so we could easily divide the bill by three!) and included the entrées, mains, rice, one dessert (ice cream and lychees – I don’t think you need a description of that!) and drinks. If you were trying to save money you could easily leave having spent less than $20 a head.

We don’t eat Thai very often but we’d be more than happy to return to Manee Siam and I suggest you try it out too!

Manee Siam Thai Restaurant on Urbanspoon