Queezle_Sister's Reviews
9 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 9Sort by: Title 
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The Silver Palate Cookbook
By Julee Rosso, Sheila Lukins, Michael McLaughlin
Workman Publishing Company - 1982
Banana Bread : page 248
This recipe makes a great banana bread. It looks good, its not too sweet, and it has just the right amount of banana flavor. We had to omit the walnuts (kids with braces), and I think it would have been even better had we included them.
Like @bhnyc, I appreciate a whole wheat banana bread. It gives the bread a greater depth of flavor, but if you didn't tell people, they wouldn't know it was prepared with whole wheat flour.
We might have over-cooked this slightly - it was a bit dry - but definitely this is a recipe worth repeating.
useful (3)
Bread Pudding : page 306
An easy dessert to prepare, with the added bonus of using up excess bread. The recipe calls for a loaf of stale french bread, soaked in milk, and then sugar, eggs, vanilla and raisins are mixed in, and it baked in a pyrex pan. The most difficult part is making the sauce - you need a double boiler, and you melt butter with powdered sugar, and then whisk in an egg (and mix till its cool), and then a bit of whiskey.
I've prepared this recipe several times. This time, I had a big pile of fairly bland bread sticks left over from a party. It was 20 oz of bread. I increased the number of eggs because I was concerned it would be too wet (bread wasn't really stale) - and it turned out just the texture I wanted.
Finally, my daughter does not care for raisins. So I replaced the raisins with cut up dried figs. That unexpected flavor and bit of crunch from the figs was great, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Don't you have old stale bread hanging around? Don't waste it - you'll love this.
useful (3)
Buttered Green Beans with Cashews : page 155
Blanched green beans are dressed with butter, salt & pepper, nuts (I used almonds in place of cashews). The result - perfect beans. I used almonds, I browned them in the melted butter, and I added basil.
I loved polishing these off - such good flavor!
useful (0)
Chocolate Fudge Sauce : page 293
I used this recipe, but tweaked to the ingredients I had on hand. I substituted chocolate chips for the unsweetened chocolate plus sugar, and I substituted peppermint schnapps for the rum. This produced a very nice sauce, with a lovely texture, and a subtle peppermint and good butter flavors, noticeable along side the chocolate.
useful (1)
French Dressing : page 222
A good zingy salad dressing that was perhaps a bit too sweet. 13-daughter licked her plate, but DH prefers viniagrette, and was only so-so on this.
Substitute confessions: I used sherry vinegar instead of red wine, and smoked paprika instead of sweet. DH thought there was bacon in it!
I prepared this in the blender rather than a food processor, and I only made a 1/2 batch. A 1/2 batch is a lot of salad dressing!
useful (1)
Garlic Dressing : page 220
This garlic dressing goes really well with the technicolor bean salad.
Unfortunately, it calls for an entire cup of olive oil. I find that I can simply cut the olive oil to 1/2 C, use the same amounts of the other ingredients (egg yolk, vinegar, sugar, garlic, black pepper), and it tastes fine, and is the right volume for the salad.
useful (2)
Gazpacho : page 55
Good fresh flavor, but perhaps a tad too strong an onion note.
I pored over my cookbooks for over a week, trying to select a recipe. There is a much bigger world of gazpacho than I had realized, and I really wanted a typical tomato-cucumber-bell pepper version. This one called for onions (specifies 2 yellow plus shallots, instead I used 1/2 a large red onion). And I used my own tomatoes.
An odd note - the recipe also called for raw eggs. I omitted the raw eggs, it wasn't clear to me how it helped the recipe, and I didn't see it in any of the other recipes I examined.
Supplementary olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper helped to flavor this soup.
I think something was missing from this - not sure what.
useful (2)
Pork Chops with Black Currant Preserves : page 98
Delicious, moist pork chops in a great sauce.
Black current preserves were the impossible-to-find ingredient here. I substituted red current, and i think it worked. I also discovered that I was out of white wine vinegar, but accidentially grabbed the Mirim. I think this made the sauce a tad sweeter than intended, but it was still very good.
Watch your cooking time. The recipe suggests 20 minutes for a 1 1/2 inch thick pork chop. Mine were about 1 inch thick, but were up to 145˚F internal temp (the new safe temp for pork) in 10 minutes.
Local chops from happy pigs!
useful (3)
Technicolor Bean Salad : page 220
This is my favorite bean salad. I've made it many, many times, dating back more than 15 years ago. I prepared it last week, and it tasted as good as the first time I made it.
This recipe calls for a variety of bean types, including garbanzos, red and white kidney beans, baby limas, black eyed peas, and fresh green beans. As @Loretta says, its easy to make - the beans are combined with scallions, parsley, and garlic dressing. The wonderfully garlic flavor is just perfect. I'm generally not a fan of bean salads, but this one is perfection. To my amazement, my 13 yr old daughter also loved it (but not the green beans).
Have fresh green beans? Give it a try.
And I should note that I use whatever combination of beans I have on hand, although the suggested types are wonderful.
useful (1)