kaye16's Reviews
9 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 9Sort by: Title 
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Flavours of India
By Madhur Jaffrey
BBC Books - 1995
Chick Pea Flour Pancakes : page 81
These were quite yummy. I made them as a go-with for a soup, but they'd be good by themselves for breakfast, lunch, or a snack.
I didn't quite add all the water because it seems plenty runny to me already. But the batter didn't swirl around as it ought; I just spread it a bit with the back of the ladle.
I used two (red) cayenne peppers from the garden rather than 4 green chilies and it was plenty hot.
Indeed the recipe make 5 pancakes, at about 5 minutes per pancake cooking. The prep is easy and could be done well ahead.
useful (1)
The mustard fish recipe looked like a sure thing. Grind some mustard seeds and a dried chili together and mix with water. Make a paste with turmeric, cayenne, and water. Rub the fish fillets with turmeric, salt, and mustard oil and let them sit for 10 minutes. Prepare some panch phoran and hot chilies for the final cooking. While the fish are broiling, the sauce is prepared by heating mustard oil, then adding the panch phoron. When the mustard seeds in that begin to pop, stir in the turmeric paste and some extra water. Then stir in the mustard paste. Bring to a boil, add salt and the chilies, stir, and remove from the heat. Pour the sauce over the fish, then simmer for two minutes. Serve.
Sounds good. Made a pretty plate. First bite—yuck! Unpleasantly strong taste of mustard. The recipe says to stir the ground mustard-chili into water and let the seeds settle. But the seeds never settled. Even after half an hour, the mixture remained uniformly grainy in texture with no settling apparent. Maybe I ground the seeds too fine, although they looked coarse to me. Or maybe the recipe meant 4 teaspoons of mustard seeds, rather than 4 tablespoons. At any rate, we both scraped off as much of the sauce as we could, then mixed the fish with the rice. This was reasonably good.
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DH says 5, so 5 it is.
I served two, with two swordfish steaks totalling about 450g. Made a halfish recipe. Used a long cup of canned tomato bits (deseeded) from the freezer. The chiles I used were not at all hot. :-(
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Gingery Cabbage and Peas : page 67
We liked this a lot, and it's an Indian side dish with a bit of color. (My Indian plates seem to be a bit monochrome, so I'm trying to expand by repertoire.)
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Indian sweetmeats are really sweet, and these are, but they are delicious.
A simple syrup that makes a single thread when dropped from a spoon into cold water helps hold the coconut together. I'm not at all experienced with this kind of thing and found it a bit hard to see the "thread" when you drop clear syrup into clear water. After several tries I did think I saw the shadow of a single thread floating, so I called it done. But, my coconut paste didn't want to hold together all that well, making me wonder if I didn't get the syrup "hard" enough. This didn't stoop them from being yummy.
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Shoba Ramji's Alimucha Oorga, Lime Pickle : page 211
I've tried another pickle, which was pretty horrible, so I was pleased to find this one was pretty tasty. Maybe not as good as a commercial lime pickle, but I'll certainly make this again if we run out.
The only problem I had was the somewhat unclear instruction to cut the limes into 2-cm pieces. I made 2-cm thick slices, but I think what is really needed is for the limes to be very coarsely chopped. In the end, I did a little remedial chopping up after it had cooked. Good stuff, this one.
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Sweet and Sour Chick Pea Flour Soup : page 79
The soup was very tasty, sour with a bit of sweet, full of spices. I did expect the soup to be a bit thicker than it was. Maybe this was a function of the store-bought yogurt (I usually make my own, but didn't have the time to make enough of it) or maybe it needed a bit more besan.
The headnotes say the soup is usually eaten with rice (I don't think soup is really an Indian concept), so I made some brown basmati rice and piled that on the soup plate before ladling up the soup. (Unfortunately, I discovered this grocery store rice was of the quick-cooking sort and the texture was gummy like Minute Rice tends to be.)
The dab that was left was a tasty afternoon snack the next day eaten cold.
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Tamarind Fish : page 154
Made this with salmon. It was delicious. And not too hard really. But you probably need two skillets, one for the fish and one for the sauce.
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Whole Potatoes with Tomatoes : page 162
Very good. Easy to make. Two of us ate all the recipe listed as 2-4.
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