Tongue Thai’d

- Alex 1 Comment

 

 

date of visit: Friday 16 December 2011

There are some places I eat at where the service is so good it helps me gloss over inconsistencies in the food. And then there are some places where it’s all about the food. Tongue Thai’d would be one of the latter.

So do you want the good (the food) or the bad (the service) first? I’m going to start with the bad so I can end on a positive note.

A friend had booked a table for eight for a Friday night before Christmas. Now, I know December is party month and everywhere is booked out but once you do actually have that booking you rather expect that everyone will be able to sit at the table. I think we were very lucky that person number eight didn’t arrive, because she would have had to have been paper thin to fit between the table and the wall or she would have spent the entire meal having people (staff and customers) push past her. Yes, Tongue Thai’d is extremely popular, but I do feel that the management’s eagerness to serve as many people as possible rather outweighs the restaurant’s physical size. People might enjoy their meal just that bit more if they had a bit of wriggle room. I’ve seen some sites describe the restaurant as family friendly but having been there I certainly wouldn’t turn up with a child that needs a high chair!

Aside from a rather squeezy table, the service, at best, can be described as adequate. Some staff were a lot more on the ball than others and I think the issues we experienced (missing drinks, the bill taking a long time to arrive) could be rectified easily by employing one or two more people and perhaps having well defined sets of tables that are looked after by individual staff. Our friends who are regulars here did say that since the modest expansion of the restaurant the service has taken something of a battering.

So now the good. The food. Which did land on our table in a timely manner and the staff, and kitchen, did cope with our requests for additional dishes with no problems. Being in a group, we started with a selection of entrées including an excellent crispy rice ball salad which everyone liked so much we had to order another one. We also had spring rolls, Thai samosas (quite different from Indian ones) and fish cakes. Everyone was happy.

For main courses we ordered the signature dish, the Tongue Thai’d eggplant. This was crispy aubergine with a sweet and sour sauce and chicken mince. That description really doesn’t do it justice. It’s the dish everyone raves about and it really is worth trying. At my insistence, we ordered another aubergine dish from the specials menu – more crispy aubergine but this time with fish, chilli and garlic. I liked this dish even more. In fact, I would go back for this alone.

We also tried the prawn and mango curry – not something I would ever have ordered myself but also really good, as well as the whole flounder.

After rather a lot of food, we somehow found space for desserts. I ordered the hazelnut meringue with apricot and cream and the only other person I’ve discussed dessert with tried the sticky toffee pudding. I liked the fact that the dessert menu made a real effort at the non-Thai dishes, but we did both feel that we could have done better making our respective desserts at home. But let’s face it, how many of us go out to Thai for the desserts?

It was lovely to go to a Thai restaurant that features some different dishes on the menu (more aubergine in Thai restaurants please!). Apparently Tongue Thai’d focusses on northern Thai cuisine which, on the basis of my visit, I’d say is something we don’t see enough of in South Australia. Having said that, more conservative Thai eaters aren’t left behind and the menu does feature the staples of Thai restaurant food such as pad thai, and green, red and massaman curries.

There’s plenty of food and, once you do get the bill, it is reasonably priced. Just be aware that you will need to book, the restaurant can be a bit cramped and noisy and the service … well, it’s casual. But once you have some crispy aubergine you probably won’t care.

Unfortunately, Tongue Thai’d doesn’t have a website (grumble, grumble) but you can you see a menu online here and it does have a facebook page.

Tongue Thai'D on Urbanspoon

Cheddar and Rosemary Sables

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Rosemary and Cheddar Sables

I have millions (well, maybe not quite) of recipes tagged in delicious and every now and then I make a concerted effort to actually cook one of these recipes. I recently discovered I have over 100 chocolate cake recipes tagged so you can expect to see a flood of those in the near(ish) future.

With the festive season well and truly upon us I’ve been doing quite a lot of party cooking and trying out a few new things. One recipe that seemed both simple and savoury (for some reason, not everyone wants a party full of desserts) was a recipe for thyme and emmental sablés (recipe in French). As I had Gruyère in the fridge I thought this would be the go.

Of course, when I came to make these, I discovered the Gruyère had been eaten but I still had some reasonably good Cheddar hanging around and rosemary, well, it grows like a weed in our garden and Cheddar and rosemary sounded like a good match.

These are super easy biscuits to make but as you do need to keep the pastry cold, don’t decide to make them on a 36°C day!

Take 80g of Cheddar and coarsely grate it into your trusty food processor. Add 60g of unsalted butter, 100g of plain flour, 1 egg yolk, a pinch of pepper (if you can use white, then all the better) and one sprig of rosemary, finely chopped. Give it a quick whizz up and then add a little cold water to bring it all together. The recipe states 5cL of water and I always get really muddled with French fluid measurements. I actually thought it meant 500mL of water (which I knew would be ridiculous) but a bit of investigation shows that it is actually 50mL which is much, much closer the mark. You don’t need very much at all.

Wrap the dough in cling film and refrigerate for about an hour and a half. As I was on a schedule I didn’t have the luxury of that long a rest and things still turned out OK.

Preheat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan).

Roll the dough out to very thin – let’s say no more than about 5mm. Work fast: you may need to cut off chunks of pastry and keep the remainder in the fridge as you go along. Cut out the biscuits, place on baking trays and bake for 10-15 minutes. You can see from the photo that you want them to puff up and cook but you don’t want them to start taking on too much colour.

Allow to cool on a rack before serving. They’re perfect as a pre-dinner drink snack, but they’d also be great after dinner with more cheese.

And you could even try making them as Emmental and thyme …

Gluten Free Shortbread

- Alex 2 Comments

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I’ve been doing a ton of cooking lately – a first birthday party, followed by a Christmas party and I’ve still got a Christmas Eve party AND the big day itself to go!

For the first birthday I was on the hunt for gluten free (or coeliac friendly) recipes.  As with vegetarian food, I find it better to seek out those things that are naturally gluten free, or very nearly so, rather than try to adapt a full fat version of a recipe.

A few years ago I went on a bit of a shortbread baking spree and remembered that many of the recipes made use of rice flour and/or polenta so I figured that I should be able to find, or at worst adapt, a gluten free recipe.

And I was right – I found this recipe on the That’s Life site. It’s really simple and I think you’re probably better off not even bothering with the food processor in the first place. I did and just had to transfer the mix to a bowl to bring it to a dough!

Sift together ½ cup of corn flour (do check that the corn flour is 100% corn and is gluten free if you’re catering for coeliacs), ½ cup of icing sugar (again, check it’s pure icing sugar and not an “icing mix”) and 1 cup of rice flour. Add 180g of unsalted butter. Now the butter can be cold and hard and you can grate it in, or you could use it slightly softened. If you do this first part in a food processor it doesn’t really matter.

Mix with your hands until the mixture comes together in a very soft dough. Chill for an hour. To make life easy for yourself, roll the dough into a sausage or log – this way, when you come to bake the biscuits you can just cut off slices.

So, while the chilling is going on, preheat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan). Line some baking trays with baking paper and then take a sharp knife to your log of shortbread. Take thin slices of shortbread, spread out on the baking tray (they’ll expand a little while cooking) and bake for 15-20 minutes. The edges of the shortbreads will start to go brown but you don’t want to over cook them.

Remove from the oven and carefully place on racks to cool. Hot they will be very very fragile so use a slice and allow them to cool before hoeing in.

Then make yourself a cup of tea and indulge!