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From: Berlin,

Joined: September 25th, 2009

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Keralan Veggie Curry with Poppadoms, Rice & Minty Yoghurt from Jamie's 15-Minute Meals

The dish itself, the flavours, at least how I made it, that's a solid four star rating - it was delicious! Everything else - the time management, the style of writing, the layout, - oh, and did I mention... read more >

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friederike's Reviews

18 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 18Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

Simple Chinese Cooking

By Kylie Kwong
Michael Joseph Ltd - 2006

A simple, basic recipe for a side dish. Beware, however, as oyster sauce with merely a dash of sesame oil is much too salty to eat! Compare to a similar version of this dish in Chinese Cuisine Cantonese Style where you mix the oyster sauce with stock (we probably used water) with a little soy sauce, sugar and salt - though spices are added, the sauce ends up much thinner yet tasty enough.

This recipe turned out to be identical for Bok Choy, Choy Sum and Chinese Cabbage ('Gai Lan') - what a cheat!

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Another of those 'nearly'-recipes. Nearly perfect. It was extremely delicious, great perfume, great taste, but the process didn't work out as it should.

First of all, we found out that our ten chicken wings weighed approximately half of the twelve chicken wings she recommends - only 800g instead of 1.5 kg. So we decided to use only half of all the other ingredients. So far, so good.

It remains a mystery, however, how you should manage to sear the meat in so little time. 800g is a lot of meat/bone, and when you add all of it in one go, your wok will cool down enourmously. Additionally, the instructions read "Using tongs, add chicken wings to the wok along with marinade." Why use tongs if you're supposed to add the marinade anyway? I let the chicken wings brown for about a minute per side and probably could have done that even longer, and then had to double the braising time as well. I imagine that all would have taken even longer if I had used the whole 1.5 kg chicken wings.

Together with vegetables and steamed rice, the 800g version is a perfect meal for four.

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Okay, but too much garlic to be really nice. Comparable to this cucumber salad, though not as nice.

Served with Soy-Dipped Radish Salad and Coconut Chicken Drum Sticks.

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A simple, basic recipe for a side dish. Beware, however, as oyster sauce with merely a dash of sesame oil is much too salty to eat! Compare to a similar version of this dish in Chinese Cuisine Cantonese Style where you mix the oyster sauce with stock (we probably used water) with a little soy sauce, sugar and salt - though spices are added, the sauce ends up much thinner yet tasty enough.

This recipe turned out to be identical for Bok Choy, Choy Sum and Chinese Cabbage ('Gai Lan') - what a cheat!

useful (0)  

A simple, basic recipe for a side dish. Beware, however, as oyster sauce with merely a dash of sesame oil is much too salty to eat! Compare to a similar version of this dish in Chinese Cuisine Cantonese Style where you mix the oyster sauce with stock (we probably used water) with a little soy sauce, sugar and salt - though spices are added, the sauce ends up much thinner yet tasty enough.

This recipe turned out to be identical for Bok Choy, Choy Sum and Chinese Cabbage ('Gai Lan') - what a cheat!

useful (0)  

Very, very delicious. If you get it right, it's crunchy and full of flavour. One of the tricks is that in order to be able to lower the toasts into the pan without losing the prawns, you need to use silicon tongs instead of wooden spatulas.

The other trick is to keep the oil at the right temperature - too hot and the toast will burn instantly, too cold and it'll absorb a lot of oil.

Last, it is really important to restrain yourself from eating too many of them (or, worse, not serving anything else so that you are forced to eat too many King Prawn Toasts) - although we did well on controlling the temperature of the oil, they did taste quite heavy. This is quite alright if you only have a few bites, e.g. 1/2 - 1 toasts per person. Kylie Kwong reckons 3 toasts per person - enough to make you feel like a bottle of oil on two legs.

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Such a simple dish, and yet such delight!
It's a very straight-forward recipe, just remember to have everything prepared before you start stir-frying, and yes, that includes the rice too! Serve it with one or two extra dishes (eg. one vegetables, one meat) to a party of four. You can also opt to add extra vegetables (peas make an excellent addition, or otherwise perhaps green beans) to serve it as a main course. And substitute the bacon with salted nuts to make it vegetarian.

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Mum's Fried Rice is so much better! I really enjoyed that dish because it had so many flavours - soy sauce, ginger, garlic, shaoxing, spring onion... in this dish, in contract, you could mainly taste the salty soy sauce, and that was about it.

The pork turned out pretty dry, though that would have been our fault; also, we substituted half of the pork with bacon cubes as we still had them leftover.

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Wow. This could have been a 5, if it not had been for the salt. Deep-frying the squid was brilliant, as was coating it in a mix of flour, salt and pepper. However, I already only used 3/5 of the amount of salt given, and yet it is so salty that I cannot even finish it!I don't really understand why. I used sea salt, albeit coarsely ground - would that be the problem? Surely she cannot mean using whole sea salt flakes? In any case, I would recommend using not more than 1 teaspoon ground sea salt, and see how that goes.

Salt and Pepper Squid comes without sauce, and is therefore not that suitable as a regular midweek supper; rather serve it at the beginning of a several course chinese meal. I faintly remember that we were always served this dish with a small dish of sweet chilli sauce to dip. The lettuce is for decorating purposes only, no need to buy if you don't happen to have some at hand.

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A nice idea, but slightly too salty for my liking. I think I'll give it another try, but will skip draining the radishes using salt and sugar.

I also noticed too late that apparently you should use large radishes - I had two bunches of small, cherry-size radishes. Because of that I only used half of the salt and sugar (but the full amount of dressing), as I couldn't imagine that much salt and sugar on such a small amount of radishes.

Served with Chilled Cucumber Salad and Coconut Chicken Drum Sticks.

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I made these because I loved the Good Luck Fish Cake I made for Chinese New Year. Unfortunately, these weren't as good, though the recipe gets points for presentation.

I guess I either shouldn't have used frozen fish or I should at least have patted it dry properly. Some of the bits were too large, especially the julienned ginger - chop them finely. The mixture on the whole was pretty soggy, so I pressed them into my mold and squeezed most of the liquid out. The texture of the fish cakes, once they were done, was very nice. The salad was ok, but somehow not really right. But the biggest disappointment was just the taste - it was nowhere as interesting and strong and complex as that of the Good Luck Fish Cake.

Make sure that whatever you want to serve with the fish cakes is ready before you start steaming the fish - it really only takes 6 minutes, and you will have to serve the fish cakes immediately as they will dry out otherwise. Whatever else you want to serve, don't serve just rice, that'll be just too plain, especially as you won't have any sauce. Fried Rice should go nicely with it.

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Hard to rate. I really liked it the first time we had it, and DH did not; the second time it was just the other way around. I think a few things are tricky in this recipe:

1. Timing. That fish needs to be just done; not raw, not overdone. I thought it was fine the first time, while DH thought it was overdone, while the second time... well, you get the idea... Additionally, the cabbage leaves (which go really well with the fish, by the way) need a slightly longer cooking time. It's probably best to add them after the fish has steamed for about two minutes, not five.

2. Sauce. You'll add quite a lot of liquid to the fish in which it'll steam/braise. Then you add a tiny amount of cold, strong flavourings (mainly soy sauce), and then a very little heated oil - it's hard to get that right, and you can probably see why. Moreover, the result is pretty thin and liquid - I would suggest adding less water as a braising liquid, though that might have an effect on how well the fish is cooked.

We served this with Stir-Fried Chinese Cabbage with Oyster Sauce, which was an excellent combination, both flavour-wise as in terms of finishing that head of Chinese cabbage.

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Very delicious, but.. The beef was slightly dry (and yet medium raw on the inside) which I put down to the fact that it had to be cut into 1 cm slices - seems a bit thick, right? Next time I'll I cut the slices thinner and see how that goes.

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Hard to say. I was really enthusiast the first time we had this, but not quite so much the second time, and so was DH. Bizarre enough, the first time we accidentally let the garlic burn, and thought it would spoil the whole dish - it didn't, it actually may have made it.

We served this with Steamed Fish Fillets with Ginger and Spring Onions, and it was an excellent combination, both in flavours as in finishing one head of Chinese cabbage.

Edited 8 December 2015:
We've made this several times since, and it's nearly always very good.

I also made a simplified version of this for my 9 month year old son, omitting the salt, using less shaoxiang and oyster sauce, and he loved it! He only ate the soft parts of the leaves, of course.

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A wonderful dish. The added salt and sugar emphasize the delicate flavours of the snow peas while the garlic gives it a contrasting note to run along with. It's quick, simple (no special ingredients!) and very delicious.

However, it's very delicate and needs to be served along with another just as delicate dish, such as fish. We had it along with the Stir-fried Beef with Oyster Sauce, and the latter just overpowered the flavour of the snow peas.

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Soo delicious, an explosion of tastes, and it looked impressive too! This is definitely on our list of 'food for guests'. We didn't serve it with lime halves as these seemed to be more for garnish anyhow. Kwong remarks that with some steamed rice this can be served as a meal for four - it won't be enough, and you'll need some veggies anyhow. Go for something that is strongly flavoured so that it can stand up to the combination of squid, garlic, ginger and chilli.

Edited 2 November 2013:
Server with Eggplant with Spicy Garlic Sauce, a very good combination!

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Not bad. But both the Stir-fried Squid with Garlic and Chilli and the Fresh Squid with Sha Cha Sauce (and even the Salt and Pepper Squid, minus the salt) were just infinitely better. Additionally, the portion was quite small - and one carrot definitely isn't enough to account for the title '... with vegetables'.

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Very, very delicious. I am actually doubting whether or not I should award a five star rating or not. It might have been a lot better if I hadn’t made a number of mistakes: first, I didn’t use pure pork mince but a mixture of pork and beef mince as pork mince was sold out. Pork mince would have been fatter and thus tenderer.

Second, I doubled the recipe to be able to serve it to four as a main dish (or rather, being a lazy cook, to two, on two different evenings…). This was probably a mistake on two accounts: The doubled amount of mince cooled down the wok more than it should have and it therefore took slightly longer for the mince to be cooked through, which made it dry out slightly. And furthermore, it just won’t taste that well on the second day, as this dish is all about different textures and the crisp vegetables will probably wilt by during reheating. Bummer. Still, it was extremely the delicious, at least on the first evening!

If you trust them enough to get the job done well, outsource the cutting of the carrot juliennes (and the ginger, and all the other stuff, but especially the carrots!) to your BF/hubby/flat mate/ whomever, because it is a lot of work.

Also, this dish produces quite a bit of liquid you won't need. Keep it, stir-fry some veggies the following day and used the kept liquid as a sauce for your rice or noodles.

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