After my previous dissatisfaction, though I did rate it highly, with an Ottolenghi’s cookbook, I thought I’d try again, and this time picked Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love. This was a success. I made four dishes, including a decadent and amazing dessert, and the recipes weren’t incredibly complicated or difficult. This book I do recommend, 4 stars.
Continue readingMay 04
Cookbook 203: Tonight’s Dinner 2
Who doesn’t love Adam Liaw, his happy face, wonderful recipes and kindness towards his guests on TV? I certainly love him and love trying out his recipes, because they are generally great and reliable. The less guesswork for me, the better.
Adam Liaw’s Tonight’s Dinner 2 is the sequel to his Tonight’s Dinner, a cookbook I loved when I cooked from it. I am behind, once again, on my updating of this blog, so I can’t remember when I cooked from this (sometime last year) and my notes are very fuzzy except for two of the four dishes. I do remember I cooked the dessert on a separate night because we were all full from dinner, so that’s one good thing. The dessert and the other dish I recall were amazing, so 5 stars.
Continue readingMay 04
Potato Pikelets/Pancakes/Hot Cakes
Whatever you choose to call them, this is a recipe I made up today to use up left-over mashed potatoes. I don’t know if you have ever had, or made potato bread, which rely on mashed potatoes, but it is soft, filling and delicious. These pikelets/pancakes/hot cakes were the same. So if you have left-over mashed potato, I recommend giving it a try.
The versatile thing about mashed potato, is that generally it is there to carry other flavours, so unless you have filled yours with garlic (which is fine, I do that too), these pikelets can be sweet or savoury. If you have filled yours with garlic, I suggest going with savoury options unless you think that garlic and strawberries go together (I’ve not tried, so I’m not going to judge).
I was making this up on the fly, so the measurements are a bit loose. I didn’t measure the mashed potato, but estimated how much it was. You can resize the recipe depending on how much potato you have, and you can add savoury/sweet extras if you want, or just pile them on top at the end. This recipe made 5 or 6 large pikelets. No photo, because I was too busy eating them for breakfast.
For the extras – choose the amount that works best for you. I used a large handful of grated cheese, but wish I’d used a bit more.
Ingredients
- 1 cup of cold mashed potato (can be a bit more)
- 1 egg
- 3/4 cup of self-raising flour
- a pinch of salt
- Enough milk to make a thick batter
- Extras (optional – choose one or more of) – grated cheese, berries, a tablespoon of honey, crushed nuts, dukkah, dried fruit, etc
Method
- Put the mashed potato in a bowl. Add the egg and stir until combined.
- Add the flour and salt and mix together, it should come together as a very stiff dough.
- Add the chosen extras, if using, as preferred and stir through.
- Add enough milk to make a thick batter. It should fall off the spoon.
- Heat a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat. Add a neutral oil and once hot, spoon enough batter into the pan to make a round of about 20 cm.
- Cook on both sides until golden brown, approximately 2 – 3 minutes per side.
- Repeat steps 5 and 6 until all the batter is used.
- Serve with any other extras that suit your additions such as fried eggs, cheese, nuts, jam, whipped cream, ice cream, etc
Oct 06
Cookbook 202: Dessert Person
This isn’t my cookbook, it belongs to James who loves Claire Saffitz (which is fair, because she’s lovely), and so he was excited when Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence was published and bought a copy of it.
The recipes all look amazing, the photography is beautiful and sound like something you want to try to make. I use the would “try” there purposefully. This is a book for people who are already very familiar with baking cakes and other sweet items, written by a classically trained patisserie chef. This is not a book for an enthusiastic amateur, unless you’re willing to make several versions of each dish, improving as you go. Many of the cakes/desserts in this book take a very long time to cook, because there are several parts to each recipe before it finally comes together.
The cakes I made for this were at varying degrees of success. I am happy to leave James to cook through this book, but I’m not going to return to it. I love cakes and desserts, but I want mine to be much less effort overall. Three out of five stars.
I’m including the metric measurements provided in the book (except for oven temperatures where I am converting them myself because they weren’t included), because US cup measures and tablespoons are a different size to metric/Australian ones.
Continue readingAug 02
Cookbook 201: Nadiya’s Everyday Baking
Nadiya’s Everyday Baking by Nadiya Hussain, winner of the sixth season of the Great British Bakeoff, is an ode to the oven and all the delicious foods that can be baked. It covers both savoury and sweet recipes from snacks through to main dishes. When I bought this I thought it would be just the usual things you get when a recipe book says “baking”, meaning cakes, biscuits, slices, and the like. The inclusion of many savoury dishes rounds out this book nicely, and with the lovely photographs, makes you want to try all the recipes throughout. Another very helpful feature is that the recipes are tagged vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, so it’s easy to find dishes to make for people with dietary requirements.
I choose two savoury, a main and a picnic snack, and one sweet, a cake, from this book. There are plenty more recipes to try out. Overall 4 out of 5 stars.
Continue readingJul 27
Cookbook 200: Destination Flavour – People and Places
Wow, 200 cookbooks. I still have more to go (because I did start buying them again) and this will probably never stop unless people stop publishing interesting cookbooks.
Destination Flavour: People and Place by Adam Liaw is excellent. I loved all the recipes I cooked, the focaccia was amazing and I want to go back and cook several of them again (I keep wanting to make the focaccia it is that good). 5 stars out of 5. Do recommend.
Continue readingNov 02
Cookbook 199: Baking Yesteryear
Of course you all know B Dylan Hollis right? You’ve seen his videos on TikTok or YouTube and you’ve laughed along with his double (or single) entendres while he cooks a recipe he’s found in some antique book store or that has been shared with him by friends. And it made perfect sense that after trialling old recipes and becoming internet famous (and probably actual famous) he’d put out a cookbook of good recipes he’d discovered and a handful of bad ones. B Dylan Hollis’s Baking Yesteryear: the best recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s was the result.
It was hard to choose what to cook from this book. I started at the beginning, as you do, and almost chose the first several recipes on reading alone. I eventually settled on a handful which I cooked over a couple of weekends, with one that I cooked twice already (because I didn’t do a good job the first time). If you like cakes that aren’t overly sweet, this is definitely a great cookbook for starters. It also helps that Hollis has included metric measurements for things so that translating the recipe across to metric isn’t too difficult. Overall 4.5 stars out of 5 and I can’t wait to cook more from this book.
All cup measures in the text below are US imperial cups – so use the weight instead.
Continue readingAug 27
Cookbook 198: Recipetin Eats Dinner
I have an admission. Prior to opening this cookbook I had no idea who Nagi Maehashi was nor what Recipetin Eats was. I saw a lot of people raving about the cookbook, but despite my terminal online-ness and love of recipes and good instructions, I had completely missed this whole show, which is my loss. To make up for it I bought Nagi Maehashi’s Recipetin Eats Dinner and cooked from it the next weekend after it arrived.
I made two main courses and one dessert (over a couple of nights because time) and one main worked perfectly, another needed a bit of adjustment (on my side, I think I used the wrong sized dish) and the dessert was amazing. Four and a half stars out of five.
Continue readingAug 27
Cookbook 197: Tonight’s Dinner
Tonight’s Dinner: Home cooking for every day by Adam Liaw was a Christmas present… in 2022 if my memory serves me correctly. At the end of last year (2023) I received a crate of mangoes as part of a fundraiser for a local school (yes I know I’m behind on updating this blog), and suddenly I needed to cook a lot of dishes with mangoes in them. So I made one of the most magical dishes ever from this cookbook, as well as two main courses. I can’t wait to tell you about the last dish, because it is going to be a thing when mangoes are cheap because OMG it was amazing and definitely a way to win at dinner parties. Five stars.
Continue readingAug 26
Cookbook 196: 100 Great Breads
Never before have I been so disappointed by a cookbook. I know I have written about being disappointed by cookbooks before on this site, but this was THE most disappointing cookbook I have ever cooked from. To start with, zero stars. This book doesn’t deserve a single star, because it broke my heart and brain by being so incredibly wrong.
I suppose I should mention which book it is that I am disappointed in, and it’s Paul Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads. Paul Hollywood is supposed to be some kind of breadmaking genius and he may well be, he cannot, however, write a recipe to save himself. I made three different breads from this book and every single one of them had a point of failure in them. I wasn’t even looking for recipes to fail, but they all did. Steps were missing (important ones like kneading), or there was additional liquid that wasn’t mentioned in the ingredients, or the oven temperature/cook time was wrong. I’ll show you what I made and where it went wrong and you too can avoid this book like the plague. Paul, I expect an apology about how bad this book actually is (he doesn’t know this site exists, so I’m not likely to get one I know).
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