Zosia's Reviews
7 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 7Sort by: Title 
| Date | Rating
Website: Smitten Kitchen
Easy dish to put together with wonderful Mediterranean flavours.
There’s a little prep work involved as the vegetables need to be sautéed first (and the eggplant salted and drained before that) but there’s no need to precook the pasta which is a real timesaver. I only allowed the eggplant 2 tbsp olive oil to cook in - if I'd used the entire 1/4 cup, those sponge-like vegetable cubes would have absorbed it all - and 1 tbsp for the remaining vegetables, which worked out fine using a non-stick pan.
The proportion of liquid to pasta was perfect..... the pasta was al dente with a crispy layer on top, and being an Ottolenghi recipe with just a few minor changes, the flavour was fabulous: bright tomatoes, livened up even more by lemon zest, rich, meaty eggplant and gooey cheese, all of it flavoured with oregano.
All it needed was a salad to complete the meal.
useful (1)
This recipe comes courtesy of David Lebovitz and at a glance, looks like most recipes for this chocolate cupcake/cheesecake treat. However, the chocolate quotient has been upped considerably by adding extra cocoa powder to the cake base and bittersweet chocolate pieces to the cheesecake portion.
The cake is an oil-based, egg free batter that’s moist and chocolate-y and makes a great vegan cupcake; the cheesecake topping is tangy and not overly sweet and if made with fat-reduced cream cheese, the cupcake is relatively low in fat. I had a partial package of cream cheese so added the mixture to only 8 of the cupcakes and baked the others plain.
The recipe made12 generous cupcakes but the batter could have easily stretched to make 3-4 more.
useful (1)
This is a very quick and easy recipe: a long soak in a brine of buttermilk, salt, sugar, garlic and paprika assures you of flavourful chicken and baking it quickly at a high temperature guarantees that it's juicy and tender with a crispy brown skin.
This was a great dish for a busy weeknight.....delicious roast chicken, steamed vegetables, rice and salad were on the table in less than 40 minutes.
useful (3)
The flavour of this bread was fantastic! A lot of strongly flavoured ingredients went into it: beer (I used stout), Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, cheddar cheese (I used aged Canadian white cheddar); they balanced each other perfectly.
The dough came together quickly though the method of adding the ingredients in stages and switching from a paddle to a kneading hook seemed unnecessarily complicated.
My kitchen was quite cool (62F) so I moved the dough to a warmer spot...it took 1 1/2 hours to double in size. I think because my kitchen was so cool, the dough was very easy to roll and shape...I had no problems with sticking or spreading. The second rise took 1 hour, again a little longer than the recipe states.
After 35 minutes of baking, the loaf wasn't quite done (internal temperature was 170-175F) so I baked it for an additional 10 minutes. My pull-apart loaf was more of a fall-apart loaf as the layers separated easily when I removed it from the pan :).
I had difficulty rating this recipe..... the flavour was phenomenal but I really didn't like the texture. Each "slice" had a lovely crust, but the centre was rather flaccid (and the cheese didn't melt!). However, it tasted so good, I will make it again, but definitely not as a pull-apart loaf.
useful (1)
I love the convenience of baked french toast but I find that too many recipes are more like bread pudding. This one isn’t and also has the added appeal of tasting like cinnamon toast: a melding of 2 delicious breakfast foods.
The first step is to make the cinnamon toast. I found that 450F was much too high a temperature for toasting the bread evenly; the bottoms were nicely toasted after only 5 minutes but the tops had not yet caramelized so I put them under the broiler. In my oven, 350-375 would have been a better toasting temperature.
I assembled the dish the night before and I think it benefited from this as it allowed the bread to absorb most of the egg mixture. Baking time was ~10 minutes longer - to be expected coming straight from the fridge.
I made a few changes to the recipe:
- replaced white with whole wheat bread
- omitted the butter on the bread ……the cinnamon topping caramelizes in the oven so stays put without it
- used 1% milk instead of full fat
I enjoyed it plain as it had enough flavour/sweetness to stand on its own but others enjoyed it with Greek yogurt and maple syrup.
useful (2)
This recipe allows the beautiful flavour of rhubarb to shine without overwhelming it with sugar and other ingredients. With lovely, tender biscuits baked on top, it made for a wonderful spring dessert.
Deb mentions that the recipe, as written, has a high proportion of topping to filling and recommends doubling the fruit if you prefer a different ratio. I prefer more fruit but didn’t have quite enough rhubarb, so I added some strawberries to come up with the 4 lbs. I doubled the cornstarch, but only used 1 1/2x the sugar (I figured the strawberries wouldn’t need as much).
The biscuits, which include the unusual ingredient of hard boiled egg yolks, were easy to make in the food processor but did require some chilling time once shaped.
The finished cobbler was fabulous. Though I included some strawberries, there weren’t enough to detract from the rhubarb. The biscuits were slightly sweet and buttery, with a tender, almost cake-like crumb (courtesy of those egg yolks, I think) but mine didn’t spread at all. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chilled them.
This was far quicker and easier to make than the rhubarb pie I normally make, but just as delicious.
useful (0)
The chicken was tasty but the results weren’t special enough to justify the extra time and steps. One hour in the brine wasn’t enough to have any impact on flavour or moistness and the steps of slow roasting and then broiling could have been replaced with roasting alone. The rub was very good but only half was needed to generously season 2 chickens, and I would never consider reducing the liquid released from the chicken for a sauce since so much of it was fat.
useful (0)