friederike's Reviews
14 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 14Sort by: Title 
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Supersalades
By Jane Lawson
Uitgeverij Terra Lannoo - 2011
A very nice salad, though not as exotic as, say, the Thai Beef Salad. What I did find a bit of a problem is that they suggested using avocado in a lunch box salad for two portions (two days you would think) without adding any dressing that would keep it from turning black. Not a good idea.
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DB enjoyed this salad a lot, especially the combination of broad beans with mint and bacon. I found the addition of stripes of iceberg salad slightly strange (though I didn't try it, can't really tell) - it surely made mixing more difficult. All in all a nice salad.
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DB enjoyed this salad, but found two faults with it: there wasn't enough dressing (or it wasn't strong enough, either way), and the veggies were grilled too thoroughly. The latter was obviously my fault, but wouldn't have been as much of a problem if there had been other, not grilled ingredients and/or more dressing to keep the salad in balance.
Also, there was too much aubergine; more peppers would have been better, especially red and yellow ones.
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A nice salad and a brilliant way to use leftovers of chicken and rice. I was surprised, though, that this salad didn't contain a single vegetable; but then again, nor do most potato salads.
Serves 2 as a lunchbox/meal. You can also omit the chicken and use more cashews and raisins to serve as a fancy rice side dish. Or substitute with tofu or anything else for a vegetarian version.
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DB had this as his lunch box salad. He thought it was slightly boring as none of the ingredients came forward as 'the star of the show', another Masterchef favourite quote. It's not a bad salad, it's just that we've had so many more salads that were a lot more interesting.
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Couscous Salad : page 220
A very nice salad! Actually I only have two comments: one is that you need to make sure you have enough salad dressing, because without it, the salad gets boring quickly. The other is that it's an awful lot of work for a salad (though it might be apt to think of it as a cold served main dish anyway) - if possible, make a double version for four, instead of a single version for two.
Made me think of this Roasted Veg and Couscous Salad, just that that salad used harissa (this one didn't) and had a dip and not a dressing.
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A nice, simple salad. Be careful not to add too much lemon juice.
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Grilled Haloumi Salad with Herb Dressing / Salade van gegrilde haloumi met kruidendressing : page 102
The haloumi didn't really work. We cut it into 1cm thick slices, as instructed; yet by the time one side was grilled, the other had already cooled of. Needless to say, it was cold (and rubbery) within five minutes once we added it to the salad.
The salad itself was very delicious, very fresh and aromatic. I wonder whether it might be a good idea to substitute the haloumi with (salted, not grilled) mozzarella. I forgot to buy olives, but actually I didn't miss them.
Serves 4 as a side.
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Haloumi and Asparagus Salad with Salsa Verde / Salade van Haloumi en asperges met salsa verde : page 189
Quite delicious, but also quite expensive, especially given the result. DB complained that the ingredients 'didn't quite come together as a dish', one of his favourite criticisms since MasterChef. The salsa verde at least definitely didn't come together as a sauce, it needed a lot more oil (4-5 tbsp instead of one) to make that happen. I substituted part of the asparagus with haricots verts (runner beans) to cut the cost, which worked very well.
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I wasn't impressed. The salad contained capers, which I don't like; apart from that (trying to be objective here), I thought they were too sour for the salad and too strong a contrast, but without them, the salad was just bland. The spices gave a nice taste, but they didn't manage to make it interesting. DH suggests using harissa or something similar for more oomph; I think the idea of capers, as in a separate ingredient that you can chew on, works best, just not as sour as capers - soaked raisins maybe?
That said, it could work as a simple side dish, where it would work by complementing the main dish, not as a dish on its own.
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Really delicious salad! I hadn't really expected this as it is seems like such a weird mixture Northern European potatoes, dill, mustard, rocket with prawns and avocado. But it was really nice! I substituted the mustard powder and part of the oil with real mustard and it was fine.
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A very nice salad, very quick to prepare, especially if you have the chicken ready. The chicken itself was slightly bland; I would suggest marinating it in a little soy sauce for a few hours before cooking, or using leftover chicken meat from another dish.
Edited 13 May 2013:
Really a very nice dish! We used chicken thighs this time to give it more flavour, and that worked really nicely. I can definitely see this becoming a standard for daily cooking.
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Salata Baladi : page 135
A nice salad, but not very remarkable. There wasn't quite enough sauce.
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Thai Beef Salad / Thaise rundvleessalade : page 120
According to DB, this is a salad with with very strong flavours; some of them even too strong. The dressing was too salty (what can you expect with 4 tbsp fish sauce and no oil?). It probably would have been too sour too if I had added all of the lime juice required - I used the juice of one lime; 100ml would have been approximately the juice of three limes. And he thought the salad contained too many shallots, though I only used 2 of the 4 required! I also used a mix of rocket and other strong-flavoured leaves, which was a good choice as iceberg wouldn't have been able to hold up against the other flavours. I used only about 250g of meat instead of the 600g required, which was fine; you'll need to adjust the cooking time, of course, or skip placing it inthe oven altogether.
All in all, a nice salad if you like strong flavours, but the ratio of ingredients definitely needs to be tweaked. We added some oil to the dressing today, let's see how that goes.
Update:
Apparently the addition of some oil (lots of oil!) and a few less shallots is all that is needed to make this a really good salad.
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