Disappointing. Possibly if I hadn't read the paragraph at the start of the recipe, I wouldn't have expected so much, but I certainly wouldn't sneak out of the house for this. I used tinned chickpeas, and had to double the cooking time to get them close to the mushy stage that I prefer, but that is the cook, not the recipe.
I might try the recipe again, but will be prepared to tweak it substantially. Also, 5 tablespoons of oil is way too much for frying the onions. Possibly the recipe is just showing its age / era.

Listed as "Australasian", but it can't be really. This recipe must have kept students and first-time-away-from-home alive for years all over the planet. A can of tuna, a can of sweet corn etc etc served with rice - better then instant noodles (probably more expensive tho).

Works well with a strong chicken stock. Small cubes of Spiced Tofu (bought) add body.

A little dry. They needed a dipping sauce.

Excellent little savoury shortbreads that you can make weeks in advance for a party. Recipe says it makes 40, but I find it only makes half that, so you may want to double the mixture.

This is the recipe that I always use for pesto. Wonderful and freezes well. Be very careful browning the pine nuts as they burn if you walk away from the stove, even if just for a minute.

Very good,usable sauce. We had it on baked snapper one night, and the leftovers with a (bought) charcoal chicken the next. Certainly jazzed up two plain dishes, rice and salad.
It was made in a about 10 minutes, and I quadrupled it, for four people. However, I didn't add as much sugar as recipe, cutting it down by about a third.

A good version of this well-known dish.

I am not sure about this one. It took at least 8 minuets of vigorous stir-frying to get the potato's cooked to what I would consider edible, and even then, they certainly didn't look enticing. The recipe calls for them to be al dente, but we all agreed that potatoes were one vegetable that needs to be cooked " to mush". At the very least, a garnish of spring onion or coriander is neded against the mass of white slivers. Also, the Chinese may consider potatoes as a rice accompaniment, but I felt like I was serving carbs with carbs.
However, we did like the flavor of the sichuan peppers and chillies with the potatoes, and maybe I would consider this dish in another way, such as frying up the pepper mix to sprinkle over bought Fish and Chip shop chips, which are the golden, crunchy chips we prefer.

I halve the sugar as otherwise it is very sweet. Also, half the recipe makes enough for 3 servings.

Fabulous way of cooking chicken in hot weather. Easy and the chicken is always moist and tender. Cook it in the cooler part of the day and leave in the fridge for a meal that night when it is too hot to cook and you don't want to heat the house up any further.
The Cantonese-Style Dipping Sauce on page 131 is the favorite to go with it, but I usually do a couple of others as well, Thai or European. I have served it with home-made mayonnaise, but that was a little bland.
This recipe (or method, really, I suppose) is sometimes known as Velvet Chicken.

Lovely light soup. The lemon juice is essential and the chicken stock must be real - no stock cubes. Use a gentle heat or the microwave to re-heat.

Good.

Horrible. Perhaps peanut butter just doesn't work as a dip.

Looked and smelt wonderful whilst cooking, but the end result was very bland. 3 basil leaves does not flavour a stew serving 4. It needed more aromatics - one of the guests suggested lemon zest and more black pepper. It was edible but next time I will try another recipe.

Yes, a very good pantry recipe. We leave out the parsley (not being parsley eaters). The variation with the anchovy and chilli works well. I do find 'tho, that the sauce really only makes enough for 2 or 3 servings, but that could be just greed.

Very good soup. Its the pesto that makes it.

Great recipe, very quick and easy to make and always popular with guests. The reason I have only given it 4 stars is becuase I have never made it with the rump steak & bok choy. I always make it with chicken ribs and it's cooked on the BBQ.

Too salty, but that could be the brand of soy sauce I used.

A good family dish, even when made with tinned bamboo shoots. I leave out the MSG and fry it in oil, not "cooked lard", delicious tho' it sounds.

Very good. I substituted spring onions for the red onion and it worked.

A nice mild soup. Added noodles to make it a light dinner and used a lot more chicken stock then the amount listed, about 2 litres.

Contributor: Geoff Janz. Very good family recipe. I don't like drumsticks, so a couple of breasts get thrown in as well. Reheats well.

Good, but not as good as I expected. The recipe doesn't specify what type of banana (probably a good thing as I only know two) but perhaps he was using a better cooking banana then I was.
Still, a delicious icecream.

Not really very nice. Just OK.

Very good robust cake. Good for picnics. The "1 carton" of sour cream is 300 ml.

Winter fare. Very good, but I only put a litre of water in at the most. Works well with gravy/stewing beef if you don't feel like oxtail.

Made this with weak beef stock instead of white wine, and it was thought good by the rest of the household. If I make it again will tweak the paprika a bit. Also, I wouldn't make this without the pressure cooker.

Quite possibly the most boring soup I have every eaten. It might have worked if I had used the beef stock instead of the bean water (both recommended in the recipe) but I will not bother unless I get a glut of pumpkins and probably not even then. There are much better pumpkin soup recipes out there.

Very good and easy to make. I use Carnation Evaporated Milk instead of the coconut milk, but that is just a family tradition from the in-laws.

The smoking oil burns the spring onion and ginger into the fish. A very little sesame oil (1/2 teaspoon?) added in is even better. The fish only takes a few minutes to cook.

Didn't have any wholewheat or bread flour, so used plain white flour, but the pitta breads were still quite good. We were using them as wraps with left-over roast chicken, salad, pineapple , coriander and fish sauce, so the suggested size was a little too small. Instead of making 8 breads from the large loaf size dough we made 6. Also, the recipe was right about the dough not puffing up if too much flour was used in rolling it out.

No matter how tempting, do NOT cook the vegetables. Just follow the recipe (note to self).
Very good family pickles.

Delicious and a good light meal if you only want to cook one dish. Recipe uses pork, or beef mince but any leftover meat will do. I never use the 7 chillies - just one or two does fine.

Nothing special.

No. But, realistically, a family that doesn't like vegetables is not going to go "oh, yum, broccoli and pasta, my favorite". It's back to stirfying it with beef and oyster sauce.

A good plain soup which made a large potful. I made it with water, not stock, and it still worked, which is always a good sign.

Excellent light potato dish, not at all heavy. I don't add the cream, but I do use full cream milk.

Combined Base 7 (roasted chana dal) with flavoring 2 (mustard & asafetida). Quintupled the recipe to make what I would consider 3 lunches, along with grits (trying to use them up) and stir-fried spinach.
A nice curry, very mild. Dry roasting the legumes gives them a nice nutty flavor.
The only concern I had was pressure cooking the legumes. My pressure cooker instructions are a bit wary of cooking beans as apparently they can froth up, and can block the vent. So, I didn't use the sites method, but followed my manual and nothing blew up.

If I can't find fresh gluten at the asian shops, or gluten flour in the supermarket, I use this recipe to make it out of ordinary bread or white flour. Good detailed instructions. I always bake them or simmer in meat stock, rather then deep-fry, just to minimise the calories. I've seen it in other books as seitan.
Just a warning, if you do simmer it, it expands to an astonishing degree.

Good, although I don't add in the radish and Sichuan pepper oil and only 1/2 tablespoon of vinegar.

The instructions were good, and the method simple, but the sauce didn't thicken. I think the problem was the cook, as I was nervous about pouring hot liquids into my 20+ year food processor, and didn't heat the vinegar and butter until it was foaming, as the recipe stated. It still tasted wonderful on steak.

A very good beef and black bean sauce recipe. I used mince steak this time, as we had a large amount of mince in the freezer, and it worked well. Also, I use the black bean garlic sauce in the jar, not the fermented black beans, even though the author says not to, but I have cooked with it for years and it works for me. Served it on stir-fried greens, not rice noodles, as I already had two white dishes, and it saved cooking a separate dish for the greens.

Wonderful and easy to make. The stock was made in the pressure cooker, and was just the Christmas turkey with a few other roast chicken bones from the freezer, and some carrots and onions. It was a double stock, as the first batch was a little weak, so I put it back into the pressure cooker with the last of the turkey and the extra bones.
I didn't have some of the ingredients, the pork meats, the bean sprouts and the Vietnamese mint, but included the remnants of turkey meat, and a teaspoon of block shrimp paste. What really made this dish was the fresh mint, which was what we needed, after the last few days. You need a strong stock for this dish as well.
The recipe says serves 4 to 6, but it only does 3, or possibly 2, for a 1 dish meal, no desserts.

There are better guacamole recipes out there. This one didn't seem to come together well.

I really didn't like this, but to be fair, I had forgotten to add the chili, so when I took it to work for lunch the next day, it was so bland as to be inedible. I don't think I will try this again, but it might work as a side dish to a spicier mains.

Very good recipe - this is the glace fruit type of fruitcake, with minimal flour.

Excellent, very detailed instructions on how to make your own pasta. She gives methods for either making it fully by hand, or else by using a food processor and a hand-crank pasta machine. I use a Kitchen Aid now to make the dough, but have used the food processor instructions in the past and still use them as a guide whenever I make pasta (not as often as I should) and always use the pasta machine instructions, rather then the ones that came with the machine.

Good.

With husband retiring, and going back to work full-time myself, he has taken on cooking dinner at night. So, not so many reviews from the Ducks Guts in the future. However, he doesn't bake, and I have discovered I can't always face breakfast, or I am running late, so I needed something I could have in the freezer, didn't have too many fats or sugars and I could eat politely and quickly at my desk. This cake fits all the requirements, except possibly the sugar. It has a lot of natural sugar from the dried fruit, so it is still too sweet, but I"ll work on that. Very quickly made in the food processor, and bakes quicker then the suggested times, about 1/2 to 3/4 hour at 150 C, but my oven is a quick oven so I always drop the recommended temperature.
It is more like a pudding, but still manageable in slices. I don't like sultanas so I use mostly prunes, which meant I could cut out the oil, except for a genorous dollop to oil the tin. Generously fills a 20cm ring tin, or a small square slice tin. Freezes well.