| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Darling, everyone was there | |
| Posted by: | Toby Young | |
| Date/Time: | 24/01/10 15:23:00 |
| I've written about it for next week's Independent on Sunday. But here's an extract, detailing the food she served: Angela and her assistant arrived promptly at 7.30pm and by the time the first guests arrived they had two different canapés prepared, some vegetarian sushi rolls with avocado mint salsa and Thai sticky pork and roasted cashews with green papaya and lime salad on spoons. The vegetarian sushi rolls were pretty good, but the Thai sticky pork was a showstopper, a combination of flavours and textures that took your breath away. My guests swooped on them with such vulture-like alacrity I began to fear they wouldn’t have any room left for the meal. I needn’t have worried. The starter was a shitake mushroom broth with water chestnut wontons that, like the canapés, was fizzing with spicy, Asian flavours. Angela had initially proposed making a chicken broth, but I’d asked her to do a vegetarian starter in deference to my wife and Caroline proclaimed it one of the best soups she’d ever had. The main course was a Thai red curry with salmon and butternut squash, accompanied by wok-tossed Chinese chives and fragrant jasmine rice. (She did a separate, butternut-squash-only version for Caroline.) Thai red curry can be a bit hit-or-miss, with many restaurants overdoing the spices to mask the inadequacy of the constituent flavours, but that wasn’t the case here. It had a freshness and clarity that I don’t normally associate with Thai food, with each of the components clearly identifiable. The guests, who included a fellow restaurant critic as well as a well-known food writer, were completely overwhelmed. They’re normally a pretty talkative bunch, but Angela’s meal was so good they were stunned into silence for long periods of time, focusing entirely on the food. At one point, when people tasted the curry for the first time, all I could hear from my end of the table were a series of profanities: *My God … Jesus … this really is f***ing good.* |