Queezle_Sister's Reviews
1394 recipes reviewed. Showing 1 to 50Sort by: Book Title | Date | Rating 
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Here In America's Test Kitchen: All New Recipes, Quick Tips, Equipment Ratings, Food Tastings, and Science Experiments from the Hit Public Television Show
By Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine
Boston Common Press - 2002
The stated goal for this recipe is a no-fuss chocolate pudding cake, however not only did the recipe fail for us, preparation is decidedly fussy! My 16-yr old son put this together, and it turned out a mess. Not only did it require five bowls to prepare (plus melting chocolate), but upon baking (and yes, he did use the correct pan size) it bubbled up over the pan's edges, spilling all over the floor of our oven.
Some of the problem might be that there were no altitude adjustments; we should have compensated, and its possible we made a mistake. I'd had high hopes for this recipe - coffee is used as the liquid and it should be a luscious mocha flavor. The crunchy baked drips that we pried off the outside of the pan, though, were very tasty - mocha crunch.
useful (0)
Easy Indian Cookbook: The Step-by-Step Guide to Deliciously Easy Indian Food at Home
By Manju Malhi
Duncan Baird - 2008
A bad flavor permeated this dish. Not sure why, but we accidentally added extra garlic (6 instead of 4 cloves). The potatoes are first boiled, and then a paste of garlic, cilantro mint leaves, ginger were added to the potatoes, and a bit of boiling water to make it a bit soupy. None of us liked this at all, and the leftovers were (sadly) discarded. I really hate wasting food, but this was not salvageable.
useful (0)
High Flavor, Low Labor: Reinventing Weeknight Cooking
By J.M. Hirsch
Ballantine Books - 2010
Postive aspects - these are easy to make. They take only a few ingredients and there is no fancy cooking technique. Another positive is that they look very nice and they do not taste too sweet.
I made these with Ghirardelli dark chocolate (60%), and I didn't scrimp on the other ingredients. But I think the two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar is just too much. It gives the entire truffle a sour note that competes with the cherry flavor, and takes away from the intensity of the chocolate. To my utter surprise, my children won't even eat them, and so I will send them to work with my husband to get rid of them. Quelle domage!
useful (0)
The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant
By Judy Rodgers, Gerald Asher
W.W. Norton & Co. - 2002
This recipe took a lot of time to put together, and the result was very dry. This recipe requires having peasant-type bread, day old, that you butter, line a custard dish, fill with roasted applesauce, and bake. I think its more appropriate to a restaurant, where day old bread might be a common thing.
Between the old dry bread, baked, and the dry applesauce, this desert really needed something wet on it - like a scoop of ice cream. If your roasted applesauce is wetter - maybe because you've used a moister apple, or live somewhere with a less dry climate, yours might turn out better.
The write up says that you should have caramelized spots, where the applesauce bled through the bread. Unfortunately, this applesauce wasn't going anywhere! I won't bother with this recipe again.
useful (1)
Vegetarian Epicure
By Anna Thomas
Vintage - 1972
This is a very simple recipe, but I think it has one fault. It requires that you first saute onions and garlic, then add 2 lbs of spinach, put the lid on, and cook it down. This causes a lot of liquid to come out of the spinach, but there is no step to drain this liquid. Therefore, when you add the eggs, its very wet. I cooked this an extra 10 minutes, and it was still runny.
Oh well... still ate it.
useful (2)
The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant
By Judy Rodgers, Gerald Asher
W.W. Norton & Co. - 2002
Of the four of us, one loved this dish, but the other 3 of us did not care for it, so it averaged to a 2.
I prepared this with canned tuna, capers, pine nuts, etc. I found that the capers accentuated the fishiness of the tuna, and not in a good way. I liked the pine nuts - to me they were the redeeming part of this recipe.
useful (0)
Big disappointment here.
I like that this recipe goes on for six pages. Over the past month, I've probably read it at least 10 times. One caution was to use good ricotta, and there is a paragraph on making sure it isn't too wet. I made my own ricotta from whole milk (following http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/02/how-to-make-fresh-ricotta-fast-easy-homemade-cheese-the-food-lab.html I then hung the ricotta in cheese cloth over night (refrigerator), and if anything, my ricotta was too dry.
I followed the variation where you use lemon zest. I made sure to have nice curds in the ricotta, and then beat them till the curds were tiny, etc.
The gnocci were very soft, I added the suggested extra white, and it didn't help. The gnocci tended to fall apart when simmering, and never really firmed up. I ended up cooking them not for 2-5 minutes after they float, but more like 10 minutes. Still they had the texture of cottage cheese.
If you could get past the texture, these tasted amazing. Light, with a hint of lemon. But they are nothing you could serve company, and even my kids didn't want to do more than a courtesy taste.
I wonder if the lower boiling temperature of my 5000 foot elevation made these not cook correctly? At sea level, water boils at 212˚, and at 5000 feet, it boils at 201˚. I double, triple checked that I hadn't forgotten any ingredients, or any steps. I think either there is a mistake in the recipe, or else its best done close to sea level!
I looked around at other Ricotta Gnocchi recipes on the internet. The others had the same ratio of ricotta to eggs to parmesean, but they also called for flour. That would probably make the gnocchi hold together better, and cook more firmly... Live and learn.
useful (3)
The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century
By Amanda Hesser
W. W. Norton & Company - 2010
This simple dish should have been delicious, but I'm not sure what went wrong. First chopped onions are caramelized -- I cooked mine (6C) for more than an hour; they became very soft but not truly caramelized. Second, I used regular greek yogurt in place of 2C sheep's milk yogurt, drained 2h. And I used regular spaghetti in place of tagliatelle.
The pasta is tossed with the yogurt, and served in a bowl with onions on top and then cheese.
Nobody liked this dish except the chickens.
useful (0)
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food
By Mark Bittman, Alan Witschonke
Wiley - 2007
This recipe involves crumbling feta into sherry vinegar or lemon juice, mixing in spices and olive oil. This breaks the feta into small pieces, and as Mark Bittman points out, it allows it to coat the spinach leaves very well.
We didn't have any sherry vinegar, so used the recommended alternative - lemon juice. Unfortunately, the salad was so sour, 3/4 of us could not eat it.
I like the conceptual approach, but this recipe requires some serious tweaking.
useful (0)
Website: Smitten Kitchen
I really wanted to love this recipe. Its beautiful, it uses seasonally appropriate fruit (pears, apples, and dried fruit), and interesting. It produced a heavenly aroma, and gave my refrigerator an exotic aroma that I found irresistible. Unfortunately, I found its strong flavor to be overwhelming.
The first step in preparing this recipe is to heat water, sugar, star anise, and vanilla bean. I used the suggested 3 star anise, but I think I would have liked it better had I only used 1 or 2. The recipe also instructs you to incubate the fruit overnight. I think instead you could make the syrup in the morning, and marinate your fruit for only an hour or two.
The sprinkling of pomegranate on top made this really beautiful.
useful (1)
DK Children's Cookbook
By Katharine Ibbs
DK Publishing - 2004
Even though this is called a sausage popover, it is mostly bread (just one piece of sausage in the middle). We prepared these in a muffin pan, and found that they were too oily/greasy. Probably its better to just make popovers, and serve the sausage on the side.
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Not Your Mother's Casseroles
By Faith Durand
Harvard Common Press - 2011
This is an interesting alternative approach to making oatmeal. The result was a pretty dry - I think it needs more milk, or to be tightly covered, to produce a creamy product. Also it very quickly hardens as it cools, making eating its leftovers less appealing.But I liked the addition of nutmeg!
I generally make oatmeal (with tofu) in my microwave - but this requires a close eye, and lots of short cooking, and still often results in a mess. With tweaking, I could see this as a viable alternative cooking approach.
Update: After 2 more tests, and comparison to microwave oatmeal, I stick with my 2 stars. I'm disappointed that this is either dry or mushy, and never approaches the light texture (with defined flakes) I can achieve in the microwave.
useful (1)
This recipe sounded so good - and I still buy into the concept of pairing sweet yams/sweet potatoes with the smoky/spice goodness of chipotle chili powder. Unfortunately there are some serious flaws with this recipe.
First problem - estimated time is 45 minutes, but the cooking time (never mind prep) is actually 65 minutes. And for me, to get sweet potatoes that were not crunchy it took another 20 minutes.
The next problem was with the liquid to solid ratio. The recipe claims to be a gratin, but with only 1/2 cup of liquid (which you are instructed to reduce) for a 9 X 11 inch pan, there is no way it can cook properly.
I doubled the amount of liquid, but still produced a very dry dish that took about 2 hours, start to finish. The flavors are good, but it needs SIGNIFICANT changes.
As a final comment - the first step of this recipe is to caramelize the onions (taking 20 minutes), yet the first step of the instructions is to peel and thinly slice 4 large sweet potatoes. This is perhaps trivial, but when you are bumming about the family's dinner being so late, you really wish you'd cut the potatoes while the onions were cooking.
Update: the second day, warmed left overs tasted good. It was dry, but the flavor of sweet potato with chipotle was very good. I think Faith is on to something here, but it needs serious tweaking.
useful (0)
Website: Smitten Kitchen
This recipe makes a beautiful scone, and I really want to love them. But I have a plate full of them right next to me and I will throw them away.
Why? First, they are dry. I found the dough was very crumbly, and so I added an extra 2T of milk (as Deb suggested). This helped the dough stay together, but the final product is still too dry.
The second problem is the flavor. When they were hot, the first few bites were great - a subtle maple flavor, not too sweet. But by bite 3, a strong bad flavor had come to dominate (for all four of us). I think the problem is too much baking powder. The recipe calls for a heaping tablespoon. I know I didn't add more than that, and I know I mixed it in well, and I cooked these for the exact specified time.
I do have new baking powder, and a different brand - hmmm - if you've advice on this, I'll look for it on the cookbooker forum.
Ah well, I cannot be smitten by all of Deb's recipes.
update: My dog politely disagrees with my review; she happily consumed the entire plate, albeit leaving a telltale trail of crumbs...
useful (1)
Website: 101 Cookbooks
This was pretty - a nice green color and the coconut gave it a very nice look. Having read Wester's review, I more than doubled the spices. But really you couldn't taste the cumin or mustard seed or the coconut - but it gave us an overall impression of just too many different flavor hints. I won't bother with this dish again.
useful (1)
Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure
By Lorna J Sass
Cookbooks - 1994
Coconut rice, yes, but not very pudding-ish.
Pluses: very quick (18 minutes start to finish), simple ingredients, and a nice flavor from cardomom.
Negatives: not custard-like, and not sweet. I used the "rich" alternative - cooking with milk - and I used currents and dried cherries. This took considerable additional maple syrup to make it palatable, although it might seem better for breakfast.
This would be better with a short grained brown rice.
update: Better as a cold breakfast with some orange zest, milk, and brown sugar.
useful (1)
Barbecued ribs and other great feeds
By Jeanne Voltz
- 2000
Chicken on the grill - but this one - no thrill...
This recipe had a lot of promise - Indian spices in yogurt, and a long time marinating in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, the chicken ended up bland - none of the flavor of the spices I had added.
It was moist, and I think pretty tender, but there are much better recipes out there for chicken in the grill.
useful (1)
Let the Flames Begin: Tips, Techniques, and Recipes for Real Live Fire Cooking
By Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby
W. W. Norton & Company - 2002
This was only OK. It was interesting to prepare - bananas (in their skin) are grilled till goopy. Then they are squeezed over vanilla ice cream, and raisins, rum and butter added.
None of us liked the butter (but for us it didn't melt). The banana/rum combination, though, is a classic, and I found it interesting prepared this way, and paired with ice cream. I had to use white rum - no dark in the house - but it would have been much better with dark (e.g. blackstrap rum).
I had a bit of trouble grilling the bananas - I think they would have benefit from longer cooking time (they would have gotten goopier), but the skin split, and they were leaking. It took about 7 minutes to get them to this point, and they were definitely very soft. But they smelled heavenly!
This is NOT a kid-friendly dish. Tried to serve it, no love from the young'uns.
useful (3)
DK Children's Cookbook
By Katharine Ibbs
DK Publishing - 2004
This is a pretty standard hamburger recipe, but it came out really dry. The recipe is just a general guideline, and suggests adding ketchup, worchestshire sauce, garlic, mustnd, salt, and pepper. We grilled them outside, and possibly over-cooked them.
useful (0)
Website: Scrumpdillyicious
scrumpdillyicious.blogspot.com
Great concept - zucchini scones with sun dried tomatoes - but the recipe had lots of errors!
I discovered this recipe, and the blog, from TheKitchn. The scrumpdillyicious blog states that the recipe is originally from "Recipes from the Wilderness" by Craig Higgins, and I think that errors arose when the blog copied it.
First problem was that 250 g of flour were to be mixed with 7 g of butter - that was only about 1/2 tsp. I guessed that 70 g were intended, and so used 1/4 C butter. The amount of cream of tarter also seemed impossibly small (2 g), and so I used 1 tsp. Before I added the buttermilk, I realized the batter was already pretty moist from the zucchini, so I threw in another 1/2 C flour.
The blog also failed to tell us the baking temperature. I tried 410, but the bottom of the scones became a tad dark - next time I'll try 375. I baked them for about 35 minutes.
The instructions say to roll the dough into balls. For me it was still too moist. But the scones were pretty good, all things considered, and very moist. My low rating mostly came from all the errors.
useful (1)
New James Beard
By James Beard
Knopf - 1981
Bland, but easily corrected.
This is the most simple of coleslaws - chopped cabbage, mayo, salt and pepper. I used home-made mayo (blender mayo from the same cookbook), and it was pretty yuck. About 1/2 tsp of celery seed and 1T rice vinegar helped give it the zest that I like in my cabbage salads.
useful (1)
Bon Appetit Weekend Entertaining: A Cookbook, Menu Planner & Entertaining Sourcebook for Occasions Large or Small, Casual or Elegant
By Bon Appetit Editors
Pantheon - 1999
This recipe bills itelf as a slaw-like salad. Everyone agreed that there were way too many onions. This late in the season radishes are not dependable, so we swapped them for raw beets. The dressing was too mild, and the overall taste was onion, onion, and more onion.
useful (0)
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food
By Mark Bittman, Alan Witschonke
Wiley - 2007
Not sure how to rate this, as the beets from my garden tasted more like radishes (too much summer heat?), and I disliked the resulting sharp flavor.
I think the concept - beets plus carrots and ginger - is a good one. Next fresh sweet beets I get, I'm giving this recipe another go.
useful (1)
Great concept, but a flawed recipe.
The tomatoes were still crunchy at the end, and the cake's top was over-done while the middle not cooked through.
The first problem (crunchy fruit) could easily be corrected by cooking the tomatoes in the butter and brown sugar for 10 or 15 minutes before adding the cake batter. And I think if there was less batter, it might cook more evenly.
This recipe was one of several upside-down cake variations - and these others might work out better than this tomato variation.
useful (1)
Joy of Cooking
By Irma Von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker
MacMillan Publishing Company. - 1975
This produced a heavily bacon product that was somewhat greasy and tasted unbalanced.
Bacon is cooked, rice is then browned in the bacon greese, and the rice and bacon are cooked in the top of a double boiler with canned tomatoes, paprika, green pepper, and garlic. It is cooked in the top of a double boiler, and takes a fair amount of time.
Perhaps not using the bacon grease, and modifying the amount of canned tomato, would produce a more pleasing final product.
Although the adults in the house didn't care for this, the kids were happy to polish it off.
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The Food Of Morocco
By Paula Wolfert
Ecco - 2011
I scaled this down to 1/4 size, and am glad.
I've triple checked my calculations - all OK - so it must be the recipe's fault that this produces a very dry pale sand pile that barely resembled this picture in the book.
I kept adding more butter and more honey, hoping it would come together. I managed to pack it into a cone for the picture, but it completely crumbled when I cut it.
I was intrigued by this recipe because the flour was toasted! I might have had too light a touch - I let it go about 5 or 6 minutes before adding the sesame seeds. Others in the house kept shouting that it smelled like something was burning, so I don't think I could have gotten it much darker without total disaster.
Despite the texture issues, the flavor of the sesame with almond is very nice. The very small amount of nutmeg and cinnamon is extremely subtle. I added a 1/4 tsp sea salt, and that helped accentuate the flavor. I will use it on my oatmeal for breakfast.
I would be very interested to know if the dessert pictured is actually the same as the recipe. Any thoughts on this, fellow cookbookers?
useful (1)
Pasta
This was a very simple recipe, but for me, the combination of carbs with carbs wasn't my cup of tea. This was my 16 yr old's selection, which he prepared for dinner. He did a nice job. The bread was grated - this took quite a bit of work - then sauteed with garlic in a large amount of olive oil.
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Latin Grilling: Recipes to Share, from Patagonian Asado to Yucatecan Barbecue and More
By Lourdes Castro
Ten Speed Press - 2011
A tad dry, but with a spicy sauce.
Chicken breast meat is laced onto skewers, and grilled. We followed the time exactly, and it was over-cooked and dry.
The sauce had oil, garlic, onion, a habenero chile, turmeric, salt, evaporated milk, walnuts, and lime. It was a beautiful yellow color - like yellow mustard. I found it really confusing because I expected to taste mustard, but it really just tasted spicy. It was way more sauce than we needed - like three times as much.
This is in a chapter on Peruvian foods, and we accompanied this with potatoes.
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Website: Honey & Jam
I wanted to love this.
Lemon - my son's favorite, rhubarb, my husband's favorite, and cake, my daughter's favorite.
Unfortunately this produced a very dense cake. The baking time was off - I baked it an additional 15 minutes, and perhaps it was still a tiny bit underdone.
The instructions have you mix half the rhubarb in, and sprinkle the other half on the top (which becomes the bottom) of the cake. I assume the batter is supposed to rise up and envelope the rhubarb pieces, but that didn't happen.
The lemon flavor was good, but the texture was not. Definitely not worth the calories, and it was not a good use of precious spring rhubarb.
useful (0)
Recipes for an Arabian Night: Traditional Cooking from North Africa & the Middle East
By David Scott
Pantheon - 1984
These flavors just did not really come together. I had high hopes for this recipe. It sounded interesting - the cookbook says this is the food with eaten to break the fast during Ramadan. The recipe starts off in the usual way for a Moroccan dish - with cinnamon, saffron, onions, etc. The soup is prepared with chick peas and rice. At the end you thicken it a bit with flour, add eggs, and then lemon. The final flavor was overly sour, and the Moroccan spices were barely perceptable.
My kids declared this inedible after two bites. I could eat it, but eventually gave it to the chickens.
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Website: The Kitchn
Nutella toast is a favorite of 13-daughter, and so this recipe caught our eye. Bread is toasted under the broiler, one slice spread with cream cheese, the other with nutella. A light sprinkling of salt, put the sandwich together, and broil a bit longer.
Meh. Cream cheese added a sour note to the nutella, but not in a good way. We won't bother with this one again
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Mediterranean Harvest: Vegetarian Recipes from the World's Healthiest Cuisine
By Martha Rose Shulman
Rodale Books - 2007
A big bunch of onions are chopped and caramelized. The long cook time works its magic by transforming the onion into a brown and rich substance. The onions are further flavored by the addition of bay leaf, thyme, garlic, salt, and pepper. Near the end of cooking, some crushed capers are mixed in.
This onion mix is used on a nearly naked pizza (a bit of EVOO first brushed on its surface), decorated with some olives, and baked.
I was pretty disappointed with this. I didn't care for the capers in the onion, and the instructions leads to a very thick layer on the pizza.
useful (1)
Website: Little House in the Suburbs
My dear husband prepared this in hopes he could make a biscuit that I would eat. Its got about 1/2 the usual amount of butter, and the flour is a combination of ground oatmeal, whole wheat, and unbleached. The biscuits come out very wet, and so need to be dropped rather than rolled.
These were somewhat mushy inside, and they reminded me of baked oatmeal. Not something I would try again.
useful (0)
Website: New York Times - Recipes
topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/recipes/index.html
I feel a little sheepish reviewing this recipe and giving it such a low score, as I did make a few omissions. However I also think the recipe is a bit problematic.
My first concern was that the ingredients were simply thrown into water - no browning to develop the flavors. I forgot to buy the leek, and so used a regular onion, but I don't think the leek could have saved the recipe. I also discovered that my kale had frozen in our current cold temperatures, and so omitted that. But as my kids point out, the kale perhaps would only have made the soup worse.
We kept adding more salt, a bit of acid, more thyme, but it was insipid.
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Website: Chocolate Covered Katie
I'm in search of a low-fat and less calorie dense blonde brownie (or brown brownie, for that matter).
The strategy for this recipe is to start with a can of chick peas, and to mash them in the food processor. Additions of peanut butter, oat flour, vanilla, etc, round out the recipe.
The flavor was ok - peanut butter and vanilla were the dominant flavor unless you got a chocolate chip. And unlike black bean brownies I've tried, the bean flavor was largely hidden. But what didn't work was the texture. These were very mushy. They didn't hold a firm shape, and didn't have the right mouth feel.
I wonder if leaving out the egg and regular flour is what caused the poor texture.
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Website: Kitchen Konfidence
The concept of this dish is a fruit version of an Italian meat-based appetizer (carpaccio). In place of the beef, you thinly slice pear - then you dress it in olive oil, lemon zest, Parmesan slices, salt and pepper - as you would for a carpaccio.
I prepared four individual plates of this for my family last night, using d'anjou pears of perfect firm ripeness. They sliced beautifully with my recently sharpened knives - thin 1/8 inch slices.
We liked the shavings of Parmesan with the pears. I liked the lemon, salt and pepper, too (but this was not generally agreed). But none of us felt that the olive oil helped the dish at all. In fact, some felt that it really took away from the light freshness of the pears.
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Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook
By Beth Hensperger
Harvard Common Press - 2004
Another mushy bowl of homogeneous beige. I had high hopes. I used a combination of short-grain brown rice and regular white rice, and old fashioned oatmeal. The 2T of wheat germ gave this dish a beautiful appearance when it was done cooking (as it had all risen to the top).
I was able to choke it down with a bit of milk, dry unsweetened coconut, and brown sugar, but I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed it.
I'm sure that there is an amazing porridge recipe out there somewhere, but I suspect that it does not involve use of the slow cooker.
I prepared this in a pyrex bowl, using my slow cooker as a water bath.
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Steamy Kitchen's Healthy Asian Favorites: 100 Recipes That Are Fast, Fresh, and Simple Enough for Tonight's Supper
By Jaden Hair
Ten Speed Press - 2013
Disappointment at the dinner table, this dish had no distinct flavor, though it seemed healthy enough with its peas and carrots. I even researched oyster sauce, and bought one recommended somewhere - serious eats? chowhounds? not sure.
I selected this book for a cookbook club dinner, and last night was my test drive of this recipe (largely selected because I can make it in my electric frying pan, appliances still not hooked up). I will select something else.
I don't know why people (such as this author) stte that tofu takes of the flavor of the sauce. I find it very difficult to get tofu to take up flavor, though of course if you take a bit of tofu with the sauce, you get the sauce flavor along with the bland smoothness that is tofu.
useful (1)
Waffles: Sweet & Savory Recipes for Every Meal
By Tara Duggan
Weldon Owen - 2012
I am always on the lookout for yeast-raised waffle recipes, so I borrowed this book from the library. Big dissapointment; the waffles came out soggy regardless of how long I cooked them, and the batter was way too thick. I added an additional 2T milk and 2T oil, and that improved them somewhat. Tasted too salty and poor internal texture.
useful (0)
Website: Food & Wine
This seemed like such a good idea - panna cotta without heavy cream (just butter milk) and cranberries for fruit. As written, there isn't enough sugar for the cranberries, especially with the buttermilk. So much tartness, even my sour-loving son didn't think it worked. I nearly doubled the sugar, and also added some salt. I think the recipe would be better with a sweeter fruit. And some heavy cream. Or skip the fruit, and use lemon zest.
Update: As I ate the leftovers for breakfast, I realized that there were few redeeming features of these "desserts", and in fact nobody liked them. So I downgraded the rating to 2.
useful (0)
Website: Cooking
If you do not like your pie sweet, then this might satisfy. I, on the other hand, expect a bit of sweetness. This recipe calls for only 4T sugar in an entire pie, and it has the wrong spice balance. I added more ginger, more cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and more sugar.
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Website: Cooking
This recipe does not work at my altitude. This recipe has a lot of butter, chocolate, eggs, and a bit of flour. Ours rose and fell, and then were a greasy chocolate mess. Too bad.
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Website: Smitten Kitchen
Forgettable.
I love sesame and tahini, and so was excited to prepare these muffins. They came together quickly and baked nicely, even at my high mountain elevation. I tasted these both with and without the tahini glaze - with glaze was better than without.
In a word, boring. The tahini flavor barely came through, even with the tahini glaze. The muffin itself seemed to have that "healthy taste" of a 1970s food coop, but not really in a good way.
If you still want to prepare these, my main suggestions would be to add raisins or currents - or some small nuggets of sweetness.
We also had issues with storing these. Over night these muffins became very damp, and sticky. So maybe save the glaze and put on just before eating??
useful (0)
Website: Epicurious
A nice idea, but lots of flaws with the recipe. Here, a whole cabbage is grilled on a beer can, essentially the vegetarian version of beer can chicken. The biggest problem is that a cabbage hollowed out to hold a beer can turns out to be a great insulator. And with a beer can in the middle, it takes forever for the cabbage to cook. And - if you could find a cabbage as large as called for in the recipe, the lid would not fit over it on a normal full-sized Weber charcoal grill.
We prepared two smaller cabbages, and still had to do a lot more hollowing out to get it far enough onto the can for the grill's lid to fit. We cooked it four times as called for, and then finally let it go over night. The next day it still required another hour on the cook top.
The nice aspect of this recipe is that it is a vegetarian version of pulled pork. You put a good BBQ sauce over the cabbage (I cooked it in a slow cooker, on high, for about an hour after the extended grilling). Served on a bun with cole slaw, my vegetarian colleagues were really happy with this meal.
useful (1)
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food
By Mark Bittman, Alan Witschonke
Wiley - 2007
This was a good enough mid-week dinner. Both kids and SO liked it. It had pretty good flavor, and was filling and felt healthy.
I prepared this as directed, except I added a step of slightly burning the sauted onions. In this recipe, you saute vegetables, add a liquid, uncooked rice, and cooked chickpeas. I didn't think that there was sufficient liquid for the rice, and I almost added more. I'm glad I didn't, though, because it came out perfect. Start to finish I probably spent 45 minutes.
I will make this again, but probably following one of the several variations.
useful (0)
High Flavor, Low Labor: Reinventing Weeknight Cooking
By J.M. Hirsch
Ballantine Books - 2010
This salad was OK. I did make my own pesto, and used a garden-grown tomato. The usefulness of this recipe is that its a good reminder that a salad can be very simple. However, my whole family thought that the pesto/tomato combination needed more punch. It might be better with more salt, or pre-salting the tomatoes before adding the pesto.
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This is a pretty easy recipe - it took me about 25 minutes, from start (getting out the pan) to served at the table. It was also good because it could shake me out of my pasta rut (tomato sauce or pesto). And it had a combination of ingredients that I love.
The final product was pretty good, but not good enough to go into high rotation. The melty goat cheese didn't look very appealing, and I had a difficult time tossing the pasta to combine all the ingredients. Nevertheless, it tasted pretty good, and my son even ate the leftovers for breakfast this morning.
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This was a very quick meal - we were able to get home from the matinee (HP7), and dinner was on the table within 35 minutes. Mac and cheese is my kid's favorite, and they really like a recipe I invented that uses tofu. Here I tried to stick with the recipe (but I did substitute yogurt for the cream), and I was especially curious about the ginger in the sauce. I'd have to say that it was a bit bland. I doubled the hot sauce, and put in more ginger and more black pepper, but it wasn't exactly the flavor we were going for.
Summary: pluses are fast and includes a vegetable, minus is that its a bit bland. If I make it again, I'll use silken tofu instead of the yogurt, and a spicier mix with the cheese sauce.
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The Very Best Of Recipes for Health: 250 Recipes and More from the Popular Feature on NYTimes.com
By Martha Rose Shulman
Rodale Books - 2010
Its hard to give a "3" to any pizza recipe, because after all, its pizza, right?
This is another pizza without a sauce - it is fairly simple, rosemary, garlic, potatoes, and some cheese.
I've prepared Jim Lahey's potato pizza, and that is my basis for comparison. In the Jim Lahey recipe, you put slices of raw potato on the pizza, and it takes a little while to bake (20 minutes). This potato pizza, though, you first boil the potatoes. For me, the potatoes were difficult to slice thinly after cooking, and even after 17 minutes in a 500˚F oven, they were somewhat watery. The pizza was still very edible (judging by its 2 hr half-life in our refrigerator), but if you are after a potato pizza, I'd try the Lahey potato pizza, linked above.
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The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant
By Judy Rodgers, Gerald Asher
W.W. Norton & Co. - 2002
This frittata is very different from the standard fare - more like a scrambled egg dish. This particular recipe started with sweet onions (I used a sweet red onion), and then pouring the eggs into the middle.
The best thing about this recipe is learning the technique - scraping the eggs into the middle, and letting it cook 5 seconds (while it spreads). I thought that the eggs turned out very nice and light - but the rest of the family didn't care for the rarer bits in the middle.
Perhaps I should have cooked a bit longer - I will certainly use this technique again.
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