Another Food Blog

My favourite steaks are Argentine ones, and Gaucho in Swallow Street serves some very fine ones. I began with the empanadas, looking like small Cornish pasties, choosing ham and cheese filling. Completely delicious. A couple of my companions tried the grilled palmetto and shrimp salad, and one of us had the yerba smoked beef, described as “sliced lomo flavoured with mate and chimichurri.”

Then the steak. They bring you a tray of raw ones to explain the properties of each cut and the taste. I chose a churrasco (spiral cut) sirloin with mushrooms, done medium rare. It was excellent, full of flavour, as Argentine steaks invariably are.

The wine to go with this was Familia Schroeder, a pinot noir from Patagonia in Argentina (it seemed only right). It was dark and fruity, and full of lingering complexity.

The Portuguese are reported to be fighting back in the battle of the wine stoppers. There was a massive switch to screw caps about two years ago, so it’s near universal for New World wines now. It does cut out the problem of ‘corked’ wine which has been tainted by a bad cork. But the Portuguese who harvest the cork trees have been running a big PR campaign to praise the merits of cork.

“A twist-off top may be adequate for a wine that is going to be drunk within weeks, even months, of leaving the vineyard,” says one of the cork merchants, “but for a vintage wine, tiny amounts of oxygen need to enter the bottle to allow proper ageing. And only cork can do that”. They’ve even hired the Special One, José Mourinho, to urge drinkers to “put a cork in it.”

There’s more at stake than just the wine, apparently, because the cork habitat has some unique animal, bird and insect life, all threatened if the ecology of the woods are not preserved.

What caused the damage to this lorry? Custard, ma’am. Exploding custard plus some rice pudding, it’s reported. The truck was carrying 60,000 cans of custard and rice pudding when passers by warned the driver it was on fire. He leapt out of the cab just before the custard and rice pudding started exploding “like gunshots going off.” Luckily no-one was harmed.

I sometime play with custard because if you mix custard powder with a little milk or water, it creates an impact solid. When under pressure it acts as a solid, but as a liquid when no force is applied. You can pull it together quickly into a ball, throw it at a wall to shatter into pieces, each of which then forms a little pool of custard. I was told that if you fire a bullet into a drum of it, it will be stopped in four inches, and will then sink to the bottom.

However, I never thought of using it as an explosive. Wisely, I never use canned custard or rice pudding. You can’t be too careful…

We are all still exploring the menu at recently opened Asia in Cambridge’s Regent Street. Part of its appeal is the division between Indian sub-continent dishes and those from Southeast Asia and the Orient. This time I mixed the two, beginning with spinach and onion dumpling with tomato and cashew nut sauce from the sub-continent side. It was extraordinarily nice. Then I went over to the oriental side for Phad Talay, seafood with garlic, chilli, bamboo shoots, and holy basil. “Holy Basil!” sounded like something Robin might say to Batman, but it lent pleasant herby tones to the dish.

This is a great place, and I’ve yet to see anything there that I don’t thoroughly enjoy. With this very satisfying meal we drank a Semillon/sauvignon blend called Head over Heels (12.5 percent) from Australia’s Eden Valley. The place goes to a lot of trouble to get its décor and atmosphere right. The decorative flower bowl pictured above) is actually carved from a whole lemon, with carrot or turnip ‘roses’ inside. I find myself wondering if there’s a basement somewhere where oriental ladies spend their day carving such niceties for our entertainment…

Back to the Thanh Binh near Magdalene College for Vietnamese food. You have to take your own wine, so we took a Limited Release tempranillo/shiraz rosé at 12.5 percent, reckoning it should go with most Vietnamese dishes.

To start with we had deep fried soft shell crab with tamarind sauce (yes, I know), and deep fried quail in garlic sauce. Both very good indeed. Then came a selection of fish, including king prawns, squid and red tilapia, with pineapple, shallots, bean sprouts and a sweet and sour sauce. There was also a kingfish steak cooked with galangal and coconut water. I really prefer kingfish fillet rather than steak, but it tasted nice enough, and the wine went perfectly with everything. A pretty good meal.