kaye16's Reviews
528 recipes reviewed. Showing 1 to 50Sort by: Book Title 
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100 Essential Curries. Madhur Jaffrey (My Kitchen)
By Madhur Jaffrey
Ebury - 2011
Very good and easy to make.
There are some errors in the recipe, but nothing too major.
- Dice the potatoes into 2cm (1/4in) cubes ... probably should be 3/4in. The picture clarifies.
- My 2cm-ish cubes took much more than 6 minutes to cook. Maybe 10 or so.
I made a half recipe as a large side dish for two.
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This recipe appears in Quick & Easy Indian Cooking. My review is here.
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Website: All Recipes
Very nice and easy. Maybe not the very best instructions in the world, but not really a problem. I did use only half the olive oil asked, since it seemed the chicken would be swimming in oil; this worked fine. Easy to assemble. Pretty presentation.
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Website: All Recipes
Pretty darn good! In spite of finger twirling, I didn't get the hole large enough, but they taste and chew just like bagels! Definitely a do again, with some serious twirling for the holes.
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Website: All Recipes
I liked this lots, my DH not so much -- he tends not to like lemony things.
- The recipe calls for "2 zucchini", which is pretty vague. I used 350g (~3/4#) of seeded chunks. (Forgot to weigh beforehand.)
- I cut the sugar back to 1/2 cup.
Really simple to make. Dump everything in the food processor and buzz till it's smoothish. Chill and freeze. Yum!
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American Wholefoods Cuisine: Over 1300 Meatless, Wholesome Recipes from Short Order to Gourmet (Plume)
By Nikki Goldbeck, David Goldbeck
Plume - 1984
At our house, this recipe srved 2 as a the main course, tasty and fast.
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Nothing fancy, but easy, fast, and tasty. Could be served in smaller portions over lettuce as a starter perhaps.
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Kind of an omelet with lots of variations.
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Easy, fast, tasty.
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Whiz the soy sauce and peanut butter (or any nut butter) in the blender, toss with some sautéed onions and some (leftover) cooked grain, and you've got a great tasting side for the rest of the meal.
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Put everything in the blender, whiz, and you've got a great salad dressing.
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This kind of thing seems a bit old-fashioned right now, but it was quite a good dish. Nothing fancy or spicy, just simple and good. My sauce was a bit runny, but I expect that's because I used my stick blender to buzz the not-quite-unfrozen ricotta and yogurt together. If I'd planned ahead a bit better, I could have mixed this by hand and it would have been a bit thicker. A short 1-1/2 cups of macaroni made about 4 cups cooked, as asked by the recipe. It might be nice to double the veggies (green olives, red bell pepper, and scallion). I think you could add lots of bits of different veggies it would be fine.
The recipe says it serves 4-6; I think 6-8 might be more like it.
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Antonio Carluccio Cooks Pasta (TV Cooks)
By Antonio Carluccio
BBC Books - 1999
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.
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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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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.
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Antonio Carluccio Goes Wild: 120 Fresh Recipes for Wild Food from Land and Sea
By Antonio Carluccio
Headline Book Publishing - 2001
Very good. Not the best risotto-making instructions I've ever seen. If you've done it before, this isn't really a problem. Very good to eat.
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The Art of Cooking for Two
By Coralie Castle, Astrid Newton
101 Productions - 1976
One of our favorite salad dressing. Simple to make,
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Excellent recipe and instructions for making crêpes and all the things you can do with them.
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Main and/or side. Reheats well.
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Another household favorite. Don't feel like cooking anything? This is it. I frequently make it vegetarian without the added ham. And sometimes I stir in a drained can of tuna at the end, which is even better than the ham.
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A good, simple tomato sauce for spaghetti.
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Very good. I use whatever fish is available. Chipotle flakes instead of crushed chili are good.
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Yum!
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It can't be much simpler than this. I make up a double dose of this whenever I start to run out. Adjust to your own taste, experiment, play around. Lately I've been using ground celery seed instead of dried celery leaves.
Cheaper than store-bought and you know exactly what's in it. Also a good way to use up spices on your shelf rather than letting them go past their use-by date.
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At Home with Madhur Jaffrey: Simple, Delectable Dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
By Madhur Jaffrey
Knopf - 2010
Snack food! Difference of opinion in the house. I think these are fantastic. The cayenne nicely complements the zing of the radishes. Spicy and sour, ideal snack food to me. OTOH, my husband who usually likes radish things, didn't like them at all.
Mine sat for well over 12 hours before them got munched up.
I might cut the salt back to 1/4tsp next time.
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Second difference of opinion. My husband likes these a lot, and I think they're so-so.
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A very nice and easy side of zucchini.
Jaffrey asks small zukes to be cut lengthwise. Bigger ones (like we get in Europe) could be cut in thick slices.
She has you sauté them in a skillet. I broiled them (since I was also broiling fish), but they could also be grilled. I don't think this matters too much as long as they get past the raw stage. Some nice reddish brown or grill marks won't hurt.
The cooked zuke bits are sprinkled with lemon juice, salt, black pepper, ground roasted cumin, and cayenne, making a very nice side very quickly.
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Website: BBC Good Food
I picked up this recipe from a blog, and quite good it is. The recipe at this site says 20 shells can be filled, the blogger cooked 25 and filled 23. I cooked 25 and filled 15, using exactly the same pasta (conchiglie rigati by DeCecco).
Suggested modification include adding a bit of chopped shallot, some red pepper flakes, and a splash of balsamic vinegar to the tomato sauce, all good additions.
Easy to make and assemble.
I thought it might be nice to use chopped spinach instead of the shredded zucchini.
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The Best 125 Meatless Pasta Dishes
By Susann Geiskopf-Hadler, Mindy Toomay
Prima Lifestyles - 1991
Pretty darn good for a fast and almost effortless dinner. The only work involved is chopping an onion and some garlic.
A light-ish soup, made a nice dinner with some Camembert after.
Six first-course servings is about right. We had two mains and enough leftover for two lunches.
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A good idea for a recipe. Some problems as printed, and I made one major-ish change.
- The recipe says it yields 8 main-course servings. It must be only 4. Plus, other recipes in the book are generally either 4 main-course servings or 8 side-dish servings. I suspect this is an error that didn't get caught in the editing.
- In halving the recipe for 2, I used somewhat more peas than asked, no reason to be skimpy. This was nice.
- I started with a short 1 cup of milk (1-1/2 cups for the whole recipe), and had to add more milk at the end to thin the sauce a bit. I suspect 1-1/2 cups would have been fine for the half recipe.
- The whole recipe called for 1 tablespoon of curry powder. I used 1 tablespoon for my half recipe; might have gotten by on 2 teaspoons, but certainly 1-1/2 teaspoons would be too little. At least for our tastes.
- Used 6-ish ounces tagliatelle for two, rather than 8 oz.
- Instead of hard-boiling the eggs (one per person), I poached them in the simmering sauce. Then removed each to one of the little dishes I'd used for the chopped onion and the flour/curry addition. Then warmed the peas in the sauce and mixed the sauce with the pasta. Served the pasta into two dishes, topping each with a poached egg.
- Some chopped chives or even parsley on top would have been pretty.
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The Best Ever French Cooking Course
By Carole Clements, Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen
Hermes House - 2002
Outstanding and easy. The dressing is good too. A household favorite
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Very good. Smoked salmon topped with fennel and cuke and a lovely vinaigrette. 100g salmon was plenty for 3 (recipe calls for 225g for 4). We're not big fennel fans, but it's quite good here.
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This is an excellent technique (called steam/sauté in other books) to use with root veggies of all kinds.
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Could be a side dish, but nice as a starter. I've made this with carrots and with broccoli. I've made all 4 for the two of us, intending to have the extras the next day, but we ended up eating them, and thought the ones that had been standing for a bit in the hot water bath (out of the oven) had a better texture.
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Of course, you really don't need a recipe to make this, but this shows the technique and has a good vinaigrette to go with it.
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I've used this same sauce with turkey scallops and with real scallops.
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I liked this; the DH thought the lentils were a bit overpowering. Seems a bit hearty, country-ish. Nice for an informal dinner.
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Good, simple sauce to go-with.
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Simple and yummy.
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Fairly standard at our house.
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We had this for xmas one year. A bit country style, and delicious.
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Very simple, very good.
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Excellent, but serving portions are too big. A half recipe easily filled 8 small mousse dishes.
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Simple and very tasty.
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Website: Better Homes & Gardens Recipes
This was really yummy, not to mention easy and fast.
I halved the recipe for two.
Having no access to Italian sausage of any kind, I used Guiliano Hazan's Homemade Sausage from the freezer, a recipe that's become a freezer staple here.
Also no mustard greens or turnip tops, so I used rocket/arugula.
Really tasty, had DH asking Isn't there more?
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The Big Book of Bread Machine Recipes
By Donna Rathmell German
Bristol Publishing Enterprises - 2002
This is our favorite ABM whole wheat bread right now. I always do it on Whole Wheat Rapid. (Am I the only one who's noticed that breads done on Rapid are better than those done with the regular timing.?) I generally use wheat bran, since I'm out of oat bran and haven't found it in France yet.
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Big Flavors of the Hot Sun: Recipes and Techniques from the Spice Zone
By Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, Alan Witschonke
William Morrow & Co - 1994
In one word, Yum! The glaze is delicious with the grilled shrimp. I made a half recipe, using one green mango and two ripe peaches for the skewers. I cut the peaches into eighths and the mango into chunks, mostly bigger than 1/2". (In the end I didn't use all of the fruit.)
My shrimp were 12/16 count, so slighty larger than required, but the timing was perfect. (For 16/20 shrimp, go with the minimum time.)
Our *only* criticism of this dish was that the onion and the mango bits (the green mango being a bit hard) did not get "done" on the grill in the short time that it takes to cook the shrimp. The peaches, on the other hand, were perfect.
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The swordfish recipe is pretty ordinary (rub with oil, S&P, and grill), but the Green Grape-Parsley Relish is a definite keeper. It sounds a bit odd (grapes, oil&vinegar, garlic, parsley, S&P) but is always a hit. It is nicest when it sits around for a bit (an hour at least) before serving.
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Very good glaze for salmon.
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A delicious relish.
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