kaye16's Reviews
5 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 5Sort by: Title | Date | Rating 
Antonio Carluccio Cooks Pasta (TV Cooks)
By Antonio Carluccio
BBC Books - 1999
Linguine with Tuna Fish Sauce : page 24
Unexpectedly very good. Also very easy and very quick. I made a half recipe, using a cup of tomato purée that I froze last summer. I bet you could use red pepper flakes instead of a real chili. I found the addition of ginger (slices) surprising, but it added a very nice taste to the sauce.
useful (0)
Tagliatelle with Chicken Livers : page 16
Chicken livers are not my favorite food, I must say, but DH likes them, so I try occasionally. This one is quite good. A half recipe was a quite nice dinner for two.
Chicken livers are so cheap, this has to be one of the cheapest meals you could make. Fresh pasta is nice, as called for, but I'm sure it would work with any dried pasta, long shaped.
Easy and fast to make. Tasty and healthy.
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Orecchioni with Piquant Sauce : page 28
A nice pasta dish, quite easy to assemble.
- The recipe calls for orecchioni, big orecchiette, but the picture seems to show big shells, conchiglioni. I've never seen orecchioni, but did find pennoni (big penne) which worked fine.
- I used oven-dried tomatoes from the freezer and did not do the soaking business. Neither did I soak the anchovies, which also came from the freezer.
- I used red pepper flakes rather than a chili. Lazy me.
- I buzzed everything with my immersion blender. I could have saved that dish if I'd just put everything in the small pot I warmed the sauce in and buzzed it there.
Nice tastes (tomatoes, anchovies, basil, parsley, capers, garlic, chili, black olives) all blended together. Not the prettiest sauce in the world, kind of a peanut butter brown, but tasty.
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Chocolate Pasta : page 59
Well, it sounded like a good idea.
The recipe says it serves 4. Those would be mighty hefty servings. I cut the recipe in half and we had much more we needed. I think 6 servings for the whole recipe would be closer.
Cut in half, the recipe looks much like Hazan's recipe from Classic Italian Cooking that I use most of the times I made fresh pasta, but with cocoa and sugar added. Those extra ingredients with no extra liquid made a mightily stiff dough. I added quite a bit of water just to get it workable and I'm sure it was still too dry. Rolling it to 5 was a bit tricky. It's a good thing I'd intended to stop there, because that was as thin as it was getting.
Rather than serving the pasta drizzled with honey and sprinkled with chopped pistachios, I served it drizzled with crème anglaise (store-bought, sorry) and sprinkled with chopped pistachios. Walnuts or other nuts would work as well, I'm sure.
Impressive on the plate, and a bit astonishing if you've never thought about the idea. Glad I made it. But don't think I need to make it again.
useful (3)
Maltagliati with Aubergine Sauce : page 32
I've read several places lately about maltagliati, so decided to make something with it. It's a nice pasta for some uses.
I rolled mine by machine, rather than by hand. Suspect that it would have been sufficient to roll to 5, rather than 6. It was good, anyhow. Would consider using this again.
I made a half recipe.
When I cut into my eggplant, I discovered it was bad, so substituted broccoli, which was the only veg available in the fridge.
The recipe has you cook large matchsticks of eggplant and carrot for the same length of time. I think the eggplant would have disappeared by the time the carrot got done. My bits of broccoli and carrot cooked in about the same time, but at one point I added a bit of water and steamed them for a while so we could eat in a reasonable amount of time.
Reasonably good sauce, considering.
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