friederike's Reviews
1109 recipes reviewed. Showing 1101 to 1109Sort by: Book Title | Date | Rating | Recipe Title 
Weihnachtsplätzchen
By Brigitta Stuber
GU - 1993
Great variation of an otherwise classic Christmas cookie recipe.
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Website: Chilli und Ciabatta
peho.typepad.com/chili_und_ciabatta
Speechless. This is a very classic German Christmas cookie (maybe even THE German Christmas cookie), they're notoriously difficult to get right, and these turned out just perfect. I would make them thinner than 1 cm, more like 0.5 cm, as they will rise when in the oven. Remember to add lots of icing.
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All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking
By Molly Stevens
W.W. Norton & Co. - 2004
It’s a huge piece of meat, so when she says, ‘rub with coarse salt’, use your own good judgement how much salt you use. I used far too much, and it showed, luckily only in the sauce.
Apart from that, it was extremely delicious – at least tastewise. The meat, unfortunately, ended up being pretty tough, and I have no idea why. As for now, I’m happy to blame the circumstances (tiny microwave oven instead of the proper thing, a clay pot with a mind of its own instead of our Le Creuset Dutch oven), but I do hope this will change once we find a new flat. BF at least was very happy with it, but then again, he’ll be happy with any large piece of meat.
We had this with the Roasted Garlic Mash from BBC Good Food, May 2009.
Amendment 12. Jan. 2010:
Instead of just plain re-heating, we braised some of the meat for dinner for another hour or so; this time in a pan on the stove. What a difference! For all but one small part the meat was much tenderer than it had been the night before. So it is very likely indeed that the braise failed due to the oven and the clay pot. But how could one hour have made such a difference?
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Holländisch kochen: Gerichte und ihre Geschichte
By Erik Winkelmann, Christine Moser
Verlag Die Werkstatt GmbH - 2011
Very nice! It was a bit of a pity that the instructions were scarse - I didn't know if I had to chop the gingerbread into pieces before adding it, if only 40 ml vinegar leftover for the marinade would be enough, if the braise needed to be covered, etc. - otherwise I would have given 5 stars.
To address the questions I had: I decided to add the gingerbread slices in cubes - I didn't like the texture, though, so next time I will probably chop them finely or even pulverize them. Because I probably used a much larger pan than they did, I had to add 300 ml water above what was instructed, so I decided not to cover the braise. I also decided that 40 ml vinegar would be quite enough, as the other 60 ml of the original 100 ml in the marinade haven't disappeared but have simply been absorped by the meat.
It does seem to be Rheinischer Sauerbraten, which is probably the version most Americans know, containing gingerbread or lebkuchen and sugar beet syrup or apple butter. The only exception here is that the meat is cut into cubes, which means that the time for both marinating as for cooking is greatly reduced, very useful.
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Website: David Lebovitz
Very delicious, incredibly moist! It's a bit like a carrot cake, it's not like you'll realize that your actually eating vegetables (DH claimed that he could very vaguely taste the courgette; I'm don't think I did).
The glaze wasn't visible as a glaze; instead it had been absorbed by the cake - it seems that there was too much liquid in proportion to sugar. I wanted to write that the glaze isn't strictly necessary as it only provides an extra sugar coating for an excellent cake that doesn't need it - but instead the lemon juice adds a layer of extra moisture that was actually quite interesting. If you want a real glaze, though, you'll have to use more icing sugar.
I used hazelnuts instead of pecans/walnuts/almonds and was very happy with this choice. I also accidentally used 1 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp baking powder, but that didn't really matter.
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Essentials of Cooking (Cookery)
By James Peterson
Konemann UK Ltd - 2000
I remember making this when I started studying at the university. It tasted okay, but not very special (heck, I was glad I was able to produce something edible!), and if I would serve it, it would be as a side dish. Do you use homemade tomato coulis and not tomato sauce from a can, I'm sure you will taste the difference; and use a few herbs, I think thyme should go well.
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Nest Koken
(, 2009)
Oh, wow! Excellent pie! Very full of flavours, the best proof that vegetarian food doesn't need to be dull at all, on the contrary.
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Marie Claire Fresh + Fast
By Michele Cranston
Murdoch Books - 2009
Not very good. The balance was totally off. I used only about 3/4 of the tomato sauce, and yet it was too much and too strong, too concentrated and too salty. The pesto (I used a commercial one) and the parmesan didn't help either. The parmesan wasn't noticeable, apart from adding more salt, so next time I would skip that. I only mixed half of the pesto through the tomato sauce and dotted the pizza with the rest. The zucchinis didn't do anything either; I wonder if using chargrilled zucchinis might change that. By the way, one zucchini was about 350-450g and more than enough - no way you'd need two zucchinis to get 250g.
The base wasn't nice either - next time I'll probably use this recipe again.
Edited 30 April 2013:
We made pizza again, using the other dough, the other tomato sauce, a chargrilled zucchini, mozzarella and fresh basil, and it was a lot better! Still slightly salty - you can probably skip the salt in the tomato sauce altogether, but very nice. The zucchini was better in taste, though I'd make the strips short next time, just for ease of eating.
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Die echte Jeden-Tag-Küche
By Sabine Sälzer
Graefe Und Unzer Verlag - 2004
A curious combination of pizza and quiche. Using yeast, the crust is that of a pizza,; the filling is that of a quiche, with a 2 cm layer of onion, some bacon and topped off with a mixture of egg and crème fraîche - but just a little of that, not as much as usually with a quiche.
The result was nice, but not particularly wowing. I thought it used way too much onion - 1 kg onion (or even less) would have worked at least as well (and believe me, it's less work, too - I was surprised how much onion I ended up with). I used only 200 g of crème fraîche, which seemed to work well enough, and 250 g bacon, which even could have been a bit more. And I also fried the onions considerably longer than 10 min, until they were just slightly soft.
This was actually meant to be my French contribution for the FIFA 2014-challenge (and actually I was planning to make a Quiche Lorraine, but then decided that I wanted it to contain onions), but now I wonder whether a onion quiche isn't perhaps more typical of the southwest of Germany. A quick search led me to near-identical recipes from both countries...
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