friederike's Profile

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 >

recipe reviews (1113)
book reviews (121)
useful review votes (554)

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friederike's Reviews

24 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 24Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

Ich helf dir kochen: das erfolgreiche Universalkochbuch mit großem Backteil

By Hedwig Maria Stuber
- 2000

Perfect accompaniment for braised meat or Schupfnudeln.
You can easily halve both the cooking liquid and the amount of cabbage (who will eat 1kg of cabbage in one go?), and reduce the cooking time to 10-15 min, at least for pointed cabbage.

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Very delicious, and unlike most recipes I've seen, not that labourious. The only thing that always remains tricky is not to overcook the fish. 6 servings instead of 4.

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I was about to complain about the mixture being too liquid and falling all apart when DB told me he hadn't really measured the ingredients and thought he might have added about double the amount of milk - well, there you go. Luckily I was able to fix it by adding about 160 g of bread crumbs. I made pretty small dumplings and managed to get about 36 of them out of it. There were nice in a soup but next time, I would probably make them larger and serve them as a side dish along with a roast and sauce.

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These taste fine, but they’re not very special. The dough tears easily, the finished cookies break easily – I wouldn’t do them again.

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Slightly less usable recipe than the one in Culinaria Germany. The main problem is that this one uses too little water, although I must admit the other recipe might use just a bit too much (still the more usable alternative). Furthermore, the other one also suggest the use of nutmeg which adds extra flavour.

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Hard to believe I've never really reviewed this recipe, as I use it all the time. To be honest, it really just gives you a basic idea of what you need to know, but then again, making broth is no wizardry, and this recipe gives you all the knowledge you need, but also all the freedom you might want to experiment.

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My god, the first real fail in this book! The chocolate sauce ended up being a kind of very thin soup, similar to a cheap hot chocolate (cheap because made with mainly water). We saved it by boiling it for quite a while until it had received the consistency we liked (and boiling it luckily didn't ruin it); next time I definitely wouldn't add any water, or only a tbsp or so if really necessary. Adding just a tiny bit of coffee liqueur was a good idea, it gave it a little more oomph, even though it was so little you couldn't really taste the liqueur.

We made the chocolate sauce to serve with these Grand Marnier Soufflés, as we thought chocolate and orange/Grand Marnier is a tried and tested combination; but unfortunately, the Grand Marnier was too subtle to hold up against the chocolate sauce.

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Very nice recipe! It's approximately comparable to the Coq au Vin from Die echte Jeden-Tag-Küche in both taste and complexity.

Remarkable about this recipe is that although it uses Cognac, it doesn't flambée it - we did - and that the mushrooms are being fried separately, which means they retain both their flavour and their texture. Minor issue: It's absolutely impossible to fry all chicken pieces in one go, though the recipe seems to imply it.

We served the rest of the topping of yesterdays Grilled Vegetable Pizza as a side dish, which worked pretty well, mainly due to the rosemary.

Edited 27 October 2014:
I was slightly worried that 45 min of braising wouldn't be enough, but in fact it was just right. Bits and pieces of the chicken even tasted just a tiny bit dry, and I wondered if that might have been because we kept the chicken pieces, covered with aluminium, in the oven heated to 50C while we reduced the sauce. One thing I didn't do (and I assume I didn't do it when I made it the first time around) is that I used other herbs - no cayenne (cayenne in Coq au Vin, really?), but instead nutmeg, dried rosemary and dried thyme, and a little fresh parsley at the end. Again, although it doesn't say so in the recipe, I flambéed the cognac again, which was especially exciting as it was the first time I did it while I was all alone.

Served with a slice of bread and Glazed Sautéed Carrots, though prepared with honey instead of sugar, and a bunch of fresh parsley - very delicious! Rosemary would work equally well.

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A classic recipe, worked well when we made it.

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Very delicate, light and delicious soup. It's made with white, not green asparagus, and took somewhat longer than I had expected it to; however, most of that is cooking time you can use to prepare other things. At a few points the recipe wasn't very clear, mainly due to the fact that it's a variant of another asparagus soup, but I doubt the results would be very different. I didn't use the asparagus peel as I have learned that it makes the soup bitter; nor did I use the butter at the end - it already contained enough butter, and I liked the taste as it was.

Serves 4 as a starter. I wonder if you could use bacon cubes or something likewise as croutons as white asparagus is traditionally served with smoked ham/bacon.

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Simple but good. We actually cut the leeks into small rings (about half a cm), but either would probably be nice.

Served with grilled salmon and celeriac mash - next time I would make a celeriac-potato mash, but otherwise a great way to get rid of leftover vegetables from making soup!

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Easy, quick and healthy dessert; also, you can flambé any other fruit as well. I once made flambéed halved grapes, which ended up looking like contact lenses – very funny, but unfortunately not child-safe due to the alcohol.

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A very easy, simple and reliable recipe for Streuselteig (crumble), nearly identical to the one in my mother's cookbook. I tested both this recipe and the one I received from my godmother, and while both of them tasted nice and crisp, I prefered my godmother's one, which contained more butter and sugar in proportion to flour than this one.

Pictured:
One base recipe, layered with (clockwise from top left) canned mandarines, fresh rhubarb, canned apricots and cherries from a glas. We used one crumble recipe on the apricots and and part of the cherries, and another one on the rest of the cherries - but I forgot which one went where! Aside from testing different flavours, we also wanted to know how much the different types of fruit would sink into the batter. Apricots were heaviest, rhubarb and cherries were lightest, which means you will have to use more cherries and rhubarb that you would use apricots to actually cover the batter (if you don't, you'll find yourself with a cake that contains fruit within instead of on top).

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I don’t know. I think I prefer bought gnocchi. Granted, you could really taste the mashed potatoes in them, but that was about it; they weren’t light enough for my taste. BF liked them though. Remember to make them no larger than half walnuts.

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A very nice, easy recipe – or maybe it's just that I've made the other Kartoffelpuffer recipe a few times since. They turned out very nicely, but took ages to get crispy – as is to be expected.

I made the apple sauce as described in the other recipe.

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Great dish – you just place all ingredients in a pan, cook it for an hour and it’s done. I only wish the meat (a smoked and salted cut of pork, usually rib) were easier available locally.

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Nice. I wasn't quite sure how it would work - you're supposed to grate the dough, then let it dry for 30 min, but unfortunately the dough was so sticky that it immediately began to form lumps, but ultimately that wasn't a problem. I think these work best with an unsalted broth as they contain little flavourings other than (salty) cheese.

A big advantage of these is that you can prepare them relatively spontaneously as you'll likely have all ingredients at hand (if you always keep some grated cheese in the freezer, as I do), and they're quick to prepare. As I said, you're supposed to let them dry for 30 min - I popped them into the convection oven for a few minutes at about 30°C.

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Well... not my type of potato salad. I prefer the classic type of potato salad, with mayonnaise and pickled gherkins (like this one!), and not with cucumbers. I am surprised that this is the only version they published in this book.

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Had I known that it would be soo easy... really, they're incredibly easy, just mix the dough (with fresh yeast - not necessary to let it rise), parboil in a brine of baking soda and then bake. Just be careful that you add the baking soda to the water before it's boiling hot, because it will react otherwise and boil over. I noticed that the small, fat pretzels ended up looking a lot nicer than the long, thin ones.

The only thing I'm not entirely happy with is that they ended up being golden brown and crisp, while they are supposed to be dark brown and soft. I suspect that food coloring might be partly responsible for that, and I will still have to learn how to tweak the baking temperature and time to make them done but not crisp. Or perhaps I should place a bowl of water in the oven?

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Sheesh. Hard to call this a lasagna. Lets start with the positive aspects: it was very very quick and easy to prepare. The only thing that really had to be cooked in advance was the spinach - fry for a few minutes with garlic. Season the salmon, mix several dairy products for the white sauce and season, then assemble the lasagna, off in the oven and you're done!

On the negative side, though, I thought the salmon was a bit too dry and the white sauce tasted a little too obvious of creme frâiche and too little of real Béchamel. And I somehow also missed a tomato sauce although it probably wouldn't have gone that well with the salmon. May be I could throw in some Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter next time?

BF liked it though; his salmon wasn't dry (which might happen as we prepared the lasagna in several small casseroles) and he liked the overall taste of it.

On the taste-side I definitely prefer the Roasted Vegetable Lasagna and also the Classic Moussaka, although both are clearly more work-intensive.

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Nice recipe. You won’t need to cook the cabbage for 45 min, 20 min is enough.

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I didn't really get this recipe. You need to mix a semolina with an egg and a little butter and then let it well for 30 min - but in what? The butter and egg hardly provide enough liquid for it to well. Next, you are instructed to shape the dumplings using two tablespoons - which would probably give you no more than three dumplings. I made smaller ones with two teaspoons instead, and I don't think they were fully cooked after 20 min.

Another issue I had with this recipe was that it instructs you to first make a test dumpling before making the rest. Well, that's interesting, but how do I know the dumpling passed the test, and what do I do if it didn't? Nope, no answers to that.

In the end, however, it was surprisingly delicious. Take care to either use plenty of salt in the broth or in the dumplings (but preferably not both).

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Very nice dressing that goes well with butterhead lettuce. The only caveat is that it produces a lot of dressing, and you won't need that much, unless you like to drown your salad in dressing - I think that for one head of lettuce we used about half the amount of dressing I made.

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Delicious. It’s not a very quick recipe, unfortunately, but it definitely qualifies as comfort food.

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