wester's Profile

From: Soesterberg, Utr Netherlands

Joined: September 24th, 2009

About me: I love cooking, I love eating, I love discovering new recipes. I have so many cookbooks I sometimes lose track of which recipe is where - though this site helps a bit. I have gone low-carb in 2010, so that's different recipes to explore again. This also means I may not agree with my own reviews anymore if they were written in 2009 or before. ------------------ I have a lovely husband and ten-year old twins who also love eating. ----------------- You can also find me on LibraryThing, BookMooch and EatYourBooks, using the same handle.

Favorite cookbook: The Complete Meze Table by Rosamond Man

Favorite recipe: Melissa Clark's Roasted Broccoli with Shrimp

Daond Pasha (Meatballs with Pine Nuts and Tomatoes) from The Complete Meze Table

The meatballs were very tasty, but I did not really like putting all the pine nuts together - it made for fussy cooking and I think I would prefer finding a pine nut here and there instead of finding them... read more >

recipe reviews (741)
book reviews (74)
useful review votes (327)

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wester's Reviews

4 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 4Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

The Best of Food & Wine: Vegetables, Salads & Grains (ILLUSTRATED)

By Loretta M. Sala, Joanna Roy
American Express Publishing Corp - 1995

I usually make a heavily adapted version of this, with only fennel, lettuce and chicken stock. But the combination is brilliant, the slight bitterness of the lettuce perfectly complimenting the softness of the fennel.

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Okay, I guess. Just slightly too many ingredients with no particular synergy.

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A good robust salad that didn't taste as weird as some of the ingredients suggest.
Adding some tomatoes, as well as or instead of the potatoes, works well too.

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This recipe is by Madhur Jaffrey, and it shows. The beans are seasoned three times: first by spices that are boiled along with the beans, then a tarka (spices cooked in oil separately and added at the end of the cooking) and to top it, a chile/cilantro salsa. Together, this produces a well-rounded, fragrant and not overly hot dish.

The fact that the salsa is added at the last moment also gives opportunities for individuating the flavour: for children, you could make a salsa without chiles, even without onions, and move some of the chiles in the other seasonings to the salsa for adults. For the cilantro-averse, you could make it with parsley, etc.

Serve with rice.

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