friederike's Reviews
12 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 12Sort by: Title 
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Pure Simple Cooking: Effortless Meals Every Day
By Diana Henry
Ten Speed Press - 2009
Baked Salmon in Mustard and Honey : page 79
Quite nice and extremely simple, but also too sweet for my taste! I would definitely add some lemon juice next time and maybe also reduce the amount of honey used. The sauce is reminiscent of the Sweet Mustard Sauce usually served with Gravlax, but sweeter than that (or at least not countered by lemon juice from other places such as the gravlax salmon).
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Basil and Tomato Butter : page 81
Quite nice, but only because I used about half the amount of butter for the whole amount of basil and tomatoes since the Black Olive Butter I made a few weeks ago wasn't strong enough at all.
That said, I actually don't know how much basil I used, but the leaves on our not-yet-quite-dead basil where tiny anyway; and I used slightly more dried tomato (4 pieces were 26 g, and I added one extra at the last moment), so in reality I probably just used double the amount of tomatoes, or more. I was wondering whether I should have used air-dried tomatoes or dried tomatoes in oil (which is what I did); in the former case, 25 g air-dried tomatoes to 75 g butter might actually work.
Served with salmon, rice (pasta would have been better), and tomato and red bell pepper salad, with strawberries as dessert - quite a red menu by pure coincidence!
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Peaches in White Wine and Basil : page 147
Excellent! Easy and very, very delicious. We also used this dish to finish various bits of white wine - worked like a charm! We had plenty of sauce leftover, which we then drank with sparkling water - very delicious as well!
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Really delicious! We marinated this for only an hour or maybe two, and the balance of flavours was spot-on - strong enough to make it interesting but not too strong to overpower the flavour of the lamb. Furthermore the lamb was juicy and tender, just perfect.
There were two changes: I accidentally only bought four (quite smallish) lamb chops instead of eight - I made an extra vegetable dish to make up for that, but in the end that wasn't necessary, as four lamb chops were just perfect for the three of us. For four servings I would recommend five or six lamb chops, though of course that always also depends on the size of the chops.
Second, somebody had sneakily eaten up the cucumber; luckily, that wasn't a problem, it was a very nice tzatziki even without the cucumber. However, I don't think I would add the two spoons of olive oil next time, I didn't see any added value in that.
Speaking of tzatziki, the lamb was just very slightly hot; I didn't really see the necessity for the tzatziki, except for at the end of some of the mouthfuls :) Anyway, even if you didn't use (alll of) it you can always serve it with some bread or potatoes (or grilled aubergines!) the following day.
We served this together with jewelled couscous, grilled aubergines and Sautéeed Spinach with Apple, Pine Nuts and Cream, an excellent combination of dishes! Dessert was Ginger-spiced Oranges with Caramel Ice Cream - this combination worked very good as well.
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Roast Cod with Smoked Bacon : page 69
As this recipe is really very simple, the right timing for he sauce is crucial - and unfortunately, it was a little off in this case. The bacon was slightly burnt and too salty, the latter probably because there was too much, even though we had already used less than mentioned, and because it was, well, slightly burnt. The butter had turned too dark as well, and well, it's just not a good idea to add parsley a whole seven minutes before the rest of the sauce is done, that should happen right at the end. The cod, however, was very nice and well-timed; a pity about everything else.
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Roasted Eggplant with Salsa Verde : page 111
The salsa verde on it's own was fantastic, absolutely 5-star-worthy; once served with the aubergines, the aubergines were drenched in oil, and you hardly tasted anything at all. I'm not really sure where this excess in oil came from, whether that was from the salsa verde (well, okay, 150ml!) or from roasting the aubergines. Therefore, I'd either suggest (a) using less oil for the aubergines, (b) roasting the aubergines in the salsa verde (with the risk of burning the herbs), or (c) use less oil in the salsa verde. As I've already made enough salsa for today and tomorrow I guess we'll try (b), though otherwise I definitely would have gone for (c). I could imagine that the salsa as it is goes nicely with something low-fat and starchy, such as potatoes, but for everything else I would reduce the amount of oil to 50-80ml.
Other than that this was a very nice and extremely easy, and I could imagine that it's a very useable side dish once you know how much oil you can add. We served these with the Spanish Pork Chops with Orange, a dish with some potential, though it still needs some tweaking.
Edited 1 April 2012:
Nope, (b) didn't help (but the herbs didn't burn either)...
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Incredibly easy and really good!
I substituted sherry for the dry vermouth, which unfortunately didn't really work - next time I'll simpy use white wine -, and I used a shallot instead of half an onion. I also only made half the sauce, because I didn't have more mayonnaise than that, but that proved to be enough anyway. You might have watercress leftover this way (around here they come in 100 g bags), which is a plus as you can serve the salmon on a bed of watercress, but do make a simple dressing for the watercress.
I used half a sheet of baking paper per fish; they were too small to wrap the fish the way she describes, but I was able to make cute little parcels using a stapler - just be careful when you're unwrapping them, especially if kids are at the table.
Serve with new potatoes and a salad (unless you're using watercress). Or, better yet: serve with pasta with dill butter (dill, butter, salt)
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Seared Tuna with Avocado Salsa : page 76
The avocado salsa was nice, but not terribly exciting; the tuna was nice, but that had nothing to do with the recipe, as it was simply grilled; the two of them combined nicely, but here's the thing: there's not much more you can do than this. Any tweaking of the salsa, making it more exciting in whichever way, would automatically mean that the salsa will overshadow the tuna. And honestly, given the price we paid for the tuna, I don't think this was good enough. I'm wondering which fish we could use instead, to bring it down to weekday supper level.
Served with Fresh Corn Cakes, which wasn't very convincing either, but combined well enough.
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Spanish Pork Chops with Orange : page 36
I liked it, though it was on the acidic side of things; DB thought it was too acidic. I guess it will be fine if you just omit the vinegar, the sherry should be acidic enough. We'll try again tomorrow. We used another type of pork chop that wasn't suitable for an half hour braise (or so DB told me), so we only added the chops during the last ten minutes and this worked perfectly fine.
We served these with the Roasted Eggplant with Salsa Verde - the combination in itself worked well, though I had some issues with the eggplant/aubergines, see review.
Edited 1 April 2012:
We substituted the vinegar with water, and it was much better! Make sure that you get the right type of pork chop - if you can't let it simmer in the juices, it won't pick up that orange-flavour (though at least the onions will).
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Sweet Herbed Ginger Roast Lamb : page 57
Very, very nice in taste, although slightly dry; however, this could have been entirely our fault as we started our easter brunch half an hour later than expected. We served this together with 'Salata Baladi' and all those different kinds of easter breads for our Easter Brunch.
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A complete disaster! Let's start with the fact that I bought 4 chicken legs as our supermarket didn't sell chicken thighs (8 were needed) - I didn't expect this to be much of a problem, I assumed that it would be helped with slightly longer cooking times. Unfortunately not. The chicken legs cooked for more than an hour, and we had to add quite a bit of water as otherwise there wouldn't have been anything to cook the chicken in. And then it didn't even taste of anything at all! All those spices, the orange - just gone!
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White Beans and Cabbage with Chorizo : page 139
Chorizo-flavoured textures...
The punchline actually says it all - all we tasted was chorizo, carried by various textures. To make things worse, it didn't actually work as the cabbage needed to cook for 20 minutes, not 3. Admittedly, we used half a pointed white/green cabbage, not a Savoy cabbage, but I don't think that made a difference - the Savoy cabbage in this recipe needs to be cooked 15-20 minutes as well. I don't really see the point of this dish, to be honest.
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