kaye16's Reviews
1460 recipes reviewed. Showing 1451 to 1460Sort by: Book Title | Date | Rating 
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At Home with Madhur Jaffrey: Simple, Delectable Dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
By Madhur Jaffrey
Knopf - 2010
Disappointing, this one. In a book full of really good recipes, this one was uninteresting.
Used lieu noir filets, rather than steaks.
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The Incredible Secrets of Mustard: The Quintessential Guide to the History, Lore, Varieties and Healthful Benefits of Mustard
By Marie Nadine Antol
Avery Publishing Group Inc.,U.S. - 2000
Good idea, poor recipe.
- What on earth are slivered carrots? I sliced my carrots fine and they weren't done in the given time.
- The dry mustard powder was way too sharp. This would be better with dijon mustard.
- No snow peas to be found; I used snijbonen, which I think are runner beans in English.
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I only realized when I was assembling the spices for this, that this is acutally a vindaloo recipe from someone who thinks vinadloo should have pototies in it. Not.
The instructions are weak.
The ingredients ask for TWO pounds of potatoes. I used only ONE pound and that was still twice two much.
Otherwise, it was ok, if nothing special.
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Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking
By Madhur Jaffrey
Knopf - 1981
This was my first attempt at an Indian pickle, I must say it was a complete failure. I suspect the chilies I used weren't right ones, but there's no guidance for choosing. Boo.
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How to cook everything vegetarian
By Mark Bittman
John Wiley & Sons - 2007
Seemed like a good idea, but it was almost inedibly bitter. Feeling bad because I used most of my stash of anchos on this. (The after-dinner aftertaste was good, though.)
Will tart up the leftovers with beans and corn hoping to improve flavor.
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How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food
By Mark Bittman, Alan Witschonke
Wiley - 2007
Seemed like a good idea, but it was almost inedibly bitter. Feeling bad because I used most of my stash of anchos on this. (The after-dinner aftertaste was good, though.)
Will tart up the leftovers with beans and corn hoping to improve flavor.
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Flavours of India
By Madhur Jaffrey
BBC Books - 1995
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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30 Minute Indian: Cook Modern Indian Recipes in 30 Minutes or Less. (30 Minute Cooking)
By Sunil Vijayakar, William Reavell
Laurel Glen Publishing - 2000
I was curious about how you can turn out a 30-minute naan. The answer is that you can't. This recipe takes a minimum of an hour. And, while the result was more or less edible, to me it tasted of baking powder.
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Reasonably good taste. Poor texture, poor instructions.
- I used basmati rice, rather than jasmine, since that's what I keep in-house and I didn't think to buy jasmine this week. These cook the same as far as I know
- The result calls for 2-1/2 cups milk. I used almost the whole liter, and the "pudding" was still as stiff as could be.
The recipe has another unclear ingredient/instructions. It asks for 1 teaspoon of crushed cardamom seeds. I suppose he means for you to take the seeds out of the pods and crush them. That's what I did. But this is a 30-minute cookbook. Why not just use ground cardamom?
Very unhappy with this one and trying to think what to do with a bowl of stiff rice pudding to make it edible.
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Floyd's India
By Keith Floyd, Kim Sayer
Harper Collins Publishers - 2001
This is my first venture into this book (my cookbook-of-the-month) and it was pretty much a failure. Something is seriously wrong with the recipe. It asks for 25g of ground turmeric. Various ingredient-converters tell me this is 8-1/3 teaspoons. That's more than 4 teaspoons for my half recipe. That's a lot of turmeric, which has a strong bitter taste and is usually used in much smaller doses. The bitter overran any subtler tastes from the other spices. Definitely won't be making this again.
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