friederike's Reviews
7 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 7Sort by: Title 
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Spanish Food and Cooking (Food & Drink)
By Pepita Aris
Lorenz Books - 2003
Avocado, Orange and Almond Salad : page 118
Nice, but I wasn't particularly impressed. Oranges in a salad are always a great idea, but the rest just was a bit boring. We used an expensive olive oil as we thought it would really make a difference in a salad - not in this one. I guess we'll reserve it for simple green salads in the future, and for simple tomato dishes.
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Baked Trout with Rice, Tomatoes and Nuts : page 146
While I was preparing the dish, I was actually quite positive - it seemed like a nice dish, and it involved little more than a few easy steps of prepping making it an ideal dish to prepare a day in advance. Unfortunately, the time needed for baking was far off - we had two small trouts of 200g instead of 500g, and had to bake them at least 10 min longer than indicated. But even worse, the filling tasted dull, and the flavours of the filling and of the earthy-tasting trout didn't combine at all. Additionally, though I really liked the idea of chopped nuts, I never knew whether I was chewing on chopped nuts or grates, so I wouldn't recommend that again for a hard-to-grate fish. We'll probably use the rest of the filling tomorrow for a bell pepper.
Edited a day later:
Not recommended for bell peppers either. I think the problem with the filling is that it combines so many so very different flavours - tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, rice, nuts, even ginger - what's that doing in there? - that it doesn't have a 'direction' to go to.
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Broad Beans with Bacon : page 134
Delicious side dish. As it consists of meat and beans, it doesn't really count as a vegetable dish, so make sure you get your 5-a-day somewhere else.
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Calderete of Rice with Allioli : page 148
It took us much longer than originally planned to prepare this dish, so beware. Of course, part of that was due to the fact that we had to scale and gut three sea basses (eeks!), something we had only done once, years earlier. But the risotto also took a lot more time to cook than expected. This could have been a problem as the fish had to be kept warm in the meantime, but luckily, all went well on this account.
All in all, it was a nice dish, but not as stunning as I had hoped. Perhaps our expectations had been exaggerated due to all the effort we had taken, but the dish just didn't match them, especially the rice - it was too salty (I thought), too liquid and still not yet perfectly done. Next time we won't add all liquid in one go, as instructed, but we'll add the broth ladle by ladle, as you're supposed to do with risotto.
The fish tasted wonderful, as did the Allioli (and my colleagues will hate me tomorrow!).
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Escalivada : page 133
Simple, delicious and low-fat, what more can I ask?
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Pollo a la Española : page 186
Tasty, although the chicken seemed to be prone to dry out – be careful not to let that happen by frying the chicken as little as possible.
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Potato Tortilla : page 104
Nice, but pretty simple tastewise. I didn't really get why they would make us fry the raw potatoes - even after a total 30 minutes cooking time, not all of them were cooked through properly. I would suggest boiling them for about 10 minutes, then let them cool and cut into slices, all of this preferably the day before. Also, add more onions and possibly some bacon or chorizo for extra flavour!
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