Sovay's Profile

From: Northern England,

Joined: October 7th, 2012

About me: I've embarked on a mission to cook something new from every cookery book I own - currently 260 - and am planning to use my account here to keep track (thanks to rfb from Librarything for tipping me off to the existence of this site). I've made a couple of rules for myself: to cook the recipe as given, with no substitution or variation unless suggested by the author; and to try to pick a genuinely new dish from each book - in other words, as I've cooked many Leek and Potato Soups in my time, I don't get to count Leek and Potato Soup as a new dish just because I haven't used this specific recipe before (unless it has really significant differences from the usual versions).

Hodge Podge from Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book

Beef and vegetable soup with beer - turned out disappointingly bland. The recipe had no seasoning other than salt and pepper - having tried it, I added a stock cube and some Worcester sauce, which helped... read more >

recipe reviews (241)
book reviews (5)
useful review votes (43)

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Sovay's Reviews

2 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 2Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

Curry Club 250 Favourite Curries and Accompaniments

By Pat Chapman
Piatkus Books - 1993

I liked this a lot but it does need one adjustment - the sweet potato needs to be blanched for quite a bit longer than the broccoli (or cut into much thinner pieces than the recipe says). I found that by the time it was tender at the stir-frying stage the broccoli was looking rather limp and khaki.

I would probably also peel the sweet potato next time, unless it had a really smooth unblemished skin.

useful (0)  

Sambars are usually fairly soupy - the instructions for this one indicated that it should turn out much thicker but in fact I had to reduce it quite fiercely to get the right consistency. It threatened to be lacking in flavour too, but the final addition of fried onion and whole spices gave it a great lift. I'm not keen on whole fenugreek seeds though - far too hard for comfort - so would probably replace them with cumin in future. I'd recommend being quite conservative with the tamarind; I added 2 tbs (recipe recommends 1-3 according to taste) and found it too much, both in flavour and because it turned the dish from attractive turmeric gold to dingy mud-brown - in fact from the aesthetic point of view I'd be tempted to use lemon juice instead, even though I like the flavour of tamarind.

useful (0)