THE potato salad in our house, made so often I am starting to look around for another hot-day potato recipe, just to make a change. Easy and delicious. Usually double it for a dinner party.

The best chicken curry EVER. It takes hours to make it tho', so perhaps make it the day before you plan to serve it. It is not a recipe you can leave to cook by itself.

Excellent recipe, but as with the casserole recipe, its the instructions at the start of the section that tell you how to make a good creamed vegetable soup with ANY vegetable that are worth their weight in gold

A very popular dish with the pork eaters in the family. I just brown the spareribs as per usual, rather then deep fry them and use about a third of the sugar. I also add more water as it does tend to stick.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was the recipe I was looking for, in an attempt to make water crackers. They were very plain and crunchy, most suitable for cheese.

The pasta maker was a necessary piece of equipment in making them, as otherwise a lot of time would have been spent rolling and re-rolling the mixture. The instructions said to fold and roll 8 or 9 times, just like puff pastry, but instead the pasta machine did the trick, just putting it through like pasta dough until it was smooth.

The first batch I rolled to the second thinnest setting on my machine, and they were perfect. Then I read the instructions, and the biscuits were suppose to be 5mm thick, so I made the next batch on the thickest setting, with the end result that they puffed up like little balloons. Interesting, but tricky to keep the cheese on.

This was surprisingly nice, and very easy to make. Putting the carrots through the food processor only took a couple of minutes, and the onions, although taking longer then I expected, only need minimal attention on the stove. However, my onions didn't drain easily, to the extent that in the end I had to squeeze the flavoured oil out with my hands. It isn't the prettiest of salads, and needs some decorating, a sprig or two of mint perhaps, or edible flowers. No tweaking was needed, which is a nice change.

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.

The best description of this sauce is "woofy", so you may not want to give it to guests, although I did have one guest thoroughly enjoying it, mixed equal amounts with another sauce,

Very good soup. Its the pesto that makes it.

Very good dip. I use 16 tomato halves and halve the amount of vinegar.

Lovely looking appetiser and is good to eat as well. Can be pretty much made in advance except for the final assembling in the last hour or so.

If you cut the amount of water to 3 cups and use stock instead, this makes a very good soup, warming in cold weather. Quick and easy to make.

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.

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.

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

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

Everybody liked this one. The mixture was too thick for my Sunbeam ice-cream maker to churn, so next time I will try substituting the half and half with full-cream milk instead.

Really nice. Comfort food in a lunch box.

I substitute a 85g tin of flavoured tuna (lemon pepper or other) for the horse mackerel and mint for the shiso leaves. Its a good recipe.

Comfort food, easily made in emergencies, and cheering to eat. This is the type of recipe you only have to make once, and after that you can make it from memory with subsitutions. I always brown the sausages first, just because we prefer them that way and certainly don't skin them.

Good, despite having a 1/3 teaspoon of smoked paprika added in by mistake, as well as the allspice (bottles look identical to each other). Took 3 hours at 80 C (trying out the low temperature cooking method). Quinces are scary to core, so cooked them in the microwave first for a couple of minutes so that the knife wouldn't slip on the hard flesh.
Forgot to say that I also added in the quinces as the same time as the meat. From past experience, quinces can take longer then you expect. I also used ghee instead of butter - butter tends to burn when browning meat, I find, but that is probably the cook.

Good stock recipe. If you were wanting to make a noodle or dumplings soup, it would be best to double stock it as the author suggests.
Note to self 15 minutes in pressure cooker and leave out the peppercorns in case they block the valve. Remember to brown vegetables in wok including chook bits.

Feels very odd, reviewing this recipe, bit like reviewing one's mother. Anyway, it is excellent for guests that turn up without warning, even when made with powdered milk. Today I added a chopped up very ripe banana, which received a tick from all. Usually I serve it with jam, or lemon and sugar, or even just plain butter. Also known as pikelets in other cookbooks.

Not very spicy, but we like spicy food. I browned the meat, adding the baharat spice mix in the last batch, rather then follow the instructions exactly. The last time I didn't fry the spices, the family said the spices tasted "raw" in the finished dish.
Made it with beef, as lamb would have been too expensive.

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.

I chickened out, and only used 1/2 teaspoon of sambal oelek, instead of the 1 tsp crushed dried chillies, so the bite was very mild. It has been a long time since I made pasta, and I didn't leave it quite long enough to dry before putting it through the cutting rollers, but it was only one of the sheets that stuck together. The instructions in this book are good, with plenty of pictures illustrating how to use a hand-cranked italian pasta machine.
I was interested to read that fredireike (sp? Sorry!) found the servings a bit small in a gnocchi recipe. I found that the serving size recommended here, I batch serves 4, was way off. Two of us ate it all in one sitting, but one of us is a big chap who is a good trencherman. Stlll, that only makes 3 ordinary servings, only just enough for a 1 course, 1 dish meal.

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.

Ordinary chedder worked fine instead of the parmesan.

Nice rich little biscuits (savoury cookies for Americans, I think). VERY easy to burn so keep an eye on them in the oven.

OK, this recipe isn't actually a soup recipe, but I make these balls to put in soup. They are a little bland - good comfort food. Make them small for soup. Quick and easy to make with a food processor.

A bit unusual, but nice once you get use to the idea. This recipe is very similar to the Portugese Chicken recipe found in some chinese cook books.

Fiddly to make. Quite nice to eat.

Good, but it is important to use a home-made stock. All the supermarket stocks left a noticable after-taste. A specialist stock might work.

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

Good.

Good, not too dry as some dumpling receipes can be.

Instead of commerical sweet and sour saouce, Chinese red vinegar works fine. I don't put the dried prawns in, although it probably would taste better with them.

Better as a snack. They are a lot of work, but they are worth it. Use the smaller European plums, a little bigger then cherry plums, and don't overbrown the breadcrumbs.

Nice light meal if you add a couple of packets of soba noodles into the soup. I don't cook them seperately. Bok choy works fine if you don't have any nappa cabbage.

Good cake. A bit of a disaster initially, as I had substituted frozen blueberries for the strawberries which made for a much longer cooking time. Pulled it out at 40 minutes and most of the cake was still raw. However another 40 minutes at 160 C and it was fine. Definately the cook's fault.
The book ONLY uses American measurements, so a bit of time was spent Googling the conversions. There is a Table Of Equivelents in the back of the book, but it doesn't have the dreaded stick of butter which is so hard to remember if you don't bake often.

Good and freezes well.

This is a good recipe, but as written in the book, you must let it soften a bit before serving. I use 3 whole eggs instead of the 5 egg yolks, and for my oven 150 C for about 3 / 4 hours is fine for the rice pudding. Pureeing half the mixture really does make a big difference to the final icecream.