Scott’s parents gave him this cookbook from friends or friends or something like that. New French Table: A fresh take on classic recipes by Emily and Giselle Roux has a wide range recipes covering soups, salads, international influences, breads, preserves and desserts. I didn’t actually eat all the recipes I made from this book (because I don’t like cauliflower), but it was well received by everyone who ate dinner that night. I also didn’t take a photo of the meatloaf, because it’s just not that attractive. Overall 3.5 out of 5.
Continue readingDec 27
Cookbook 134: Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food (and revisiting cookbook 115)
I’m quite behind in writing these up, so they are not going to be in a particular order, and i may forget what I thought about recipes. 2018 has been a year, and I’ve been flat out for most of it. It’s not been bad for me personally, but it has been from stressful to bad for many people I love and care for, so my energy has been taken up helping and caring where I can. So, let’s review.
Because my sister doesn’t want material things while she is waiting for her house to be built (she doesn’t have anywhere to put them), I offered to cook her a two to three course meal for her birthday. Her partner grew up in Indonesia and was hugely excited to find that I had Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food cookbook as she is considered the go-to cookbook expert for Indonesians, and so he wanted me to cook a couple of dishes from that, and my sister wanted some recipes from Curry: Fragrant dishes from India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to complement the other recipes, and a meal was born. I’m going to detail the recipes from Curry, but not put as much effort into them as I am Indonesian Food, because that is the focus for this review. FYI Sri Owen was also involved in writing Curry, so the whole meal was tied together by one recipe author.
I really liked Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food cookbook. To start with, it’s actually gorgeous. Mine is hardcover, a purple background with gold embossed batik style patterns. The photos in the book are lovely, and the book is broken up into different periods of Sri Owen’s life, where the recipes are from “grandmother’s recipes” and “street snacks”, details on staples and basics, and methods and techniques. It’s easy to follow, the recipes I cooked were delicious, and I’d happily cook from this book again. 4 out of 5 stars.
Continue readingMar 26
Cookbook 133: The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook
The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook by Tess Mallos had been on my wish list for some time. When I saw it for sale for a very reasonable chance I bought it immediately. The reason it was on my wish list? It has a section on Yemeni food, a cuisine I fell in love with when I discovered (now closed) a Yemeni restaurant in Melbourne. It is so hard to find Yemeni cookbooks, so this book made me happy.
The cookbook covers food from Greece through to Afghanistan, is well laid out and has great photos. There are a couple of minor issues though which makes this book less than perfect. The first being that one of the recipes we cooked clearly missed a step of rinsing the salt out of some leeks, because the dish became too salty to eat. I think this book could have done with a bit more testing before publishing, but that said the other two dishes were delightful and I do look forward to cooking more from this book. Overall I give it 3 out of 5 stars.
Jan 07
Cookbook 132: The Jewelled Kitchen
The Jewelled Kitchen by Bethany Kehdy is a stunningly beautiful cookbook. I bought it because it looked so beautiful and I was intrigued by the recipes inside. Sadly, despite it being beautiful, the recipes did not work for me the way I hoped and it was a tiny bit disappointing. I think that as I cook more from this book I will be able to adjust the recipes to work more for me. Right now I give it 2 out of 5 stars.
Jan 07
Cookbook 131: Pasta
I found this in a box of stuff Scott’s parents had given him, which had been sitting in the garage for some time. Hamlyn’s CookSmart, Easy Cooking Great Eating, Pasta, seems to be out of print in the edition I have (here), but I believe the first one I linked to is more or less the same.
Ok, a bit about the hiatus on this blog. I’ve finally finished studying a Graduate Diploma of Museum Studies and then travelling and then all the stress that Christmas and New Year brings into my life. Studying ate up so much of my time over the last two years, so very little cooking was done. There is a small pile of cookbooks on the floor next to my desk from the cooking I did do, and I have to struggle to remember what I did and did not like about the recipes, but at least I can write those up and then move to returning to my old habit of cooking interesting and tasty food each weekend until I run out of cookbooks (this is unlikely to ever happen).
So this book is a weird rectangular thing that is bound in one corner, really like a collection of paint swatches. It makes it annoying to use in the kitchen because the ingredients are on one side and the method for the recipe on the other side of the same “page”. When you’re cooking more than one pasta dish, that makes the whole thing more annoying. Though the recipes were tasty (I’ve made one again already), so I’m going to give this 3 out of 5 (would score higher if the format wasn’t so annoying).
Mar 02
Cookbook 130: Garlic Feast
Garlic Feast by Janice Sutton was gifted to us by Scott’s parents, who had it autographed by Janice Sutton. It won Australian Cookbook of the year last year (I think) and is full of recipes using garlic. Some of the recipes are easier than others, paticularly in relation to accessing certain types of garlic. I learnt, thanks to this book, that black garlic is a thing, and then I discovered that you can buy it at Coles Supermarkets. So I made my Macaroni and Cheese dish (after reading through and disregarding the one in this cookbook) with mushrooms and liquid smoke instead of bacon, and added black garlic. It was good.
I only ended up making one recipe from this dish because slow roasting a lamb is a time intensive process and because it was only the three omnivores at home for the weekend. I served the roast lamb with roast potatoes that were beautifully cooked by Scott, and kept the leftover lamb, sauce and garlic to use at a later date (it ended up in a risotto). So far I’d give this book 4 out of 5 stars.
Jan 02
Cookbook 129: The Complete Asian Cookbook: indonesia malaysia & singapore
I have problems with a book styling itself as The Complete Asian Cookbook: indonesia malaysia & singapore (by Charmaine Solomon) because that’s not all of Asia, even if it is a part of Asia whose food I really enjoy. Oddly enough there are twice as many recipes for Indonesia than there are for Malaysia and Singapore, not quite sure whether Charmaine just couldn’t be bothered by the time she got to the Malaysian and Singaporean recipes, or whether given their geographical closeness and many common dishes, she just only included the dishes from Malaysia and Singapore that were unique. I could probably read the introduction to figure this out, but I’m not here for that, I’m here for the food.
(By the way, as of posting this, the book is very cheap on Booktopia (link above) and I do recommend buying it).
The recipes are mostly good, there were a few I didn’t cook because they didn’t make sense to me, nor to anyone else I cook with, and they need a complete rewrite. The recipes I did choose to cook though were amazing. An important note about chillies – some chillies are hotter than others, and when you buy chillies that are not even remotely hot, the dishes are delicious and you can eat more of them. (Ability to tolerate chilli is an individual thing). Overall I give this 4 out of 5.
(All photos taken with my phone, some of them are rubbish, sorry)
Jan 02
Cookbook 128: BBQ Secrets – Summer BBQ Guide
I backed Rich Evans’s BBQ Secrets: Summer BBQ Guide on Kickstarter because it’s always great to have new ideas for making BBQs more interesting, and we’ve already incorporated one of the recipes (the corn below) into how we cook BBQs permanently. There are more recipes in here I want to try (except for the seafood, because that’s not for me). If you want a copy yourself, I note that there appear to be several sites where you can download the book, and as I don’t know whether they are with or without Rich’s permission, I haven’t linked to any of them. The link above is the to the Kindle edition at Amazon.
This is a good book with helpful suggestions as to what type of BBQs the recipes work best on (wood, gas, electric), a great range of meat, seafood and vegetarian recipes, some side dishes, and marinades and sauces. I enjoyed cooking from it, and will go back for more. Overall 4.5 stars out of 5.
Jan 02
Cookbook 127: The International Garlic Cookbook
So I’ve been busy, too busy to cook regularly and too busy to blog about what I have cooked. My new years resolution for 2017 is to cook more and to blog about it quicker, though this might require me to be less busy. We’ll see how it goes. And Happy New Year for 2017. May your cakes cook evenly, your roasts be golden, and your kitchen full of the smell of tasty and delicious food.
I cooked from The International Garlic Cookbook, which is a bit of a stretch in my opinion as to the name at least. I cooked three dishes, and well… it could have done with more garlic. Even though all the recipes had garlic in them, some of them needed more. The instructions were good (probably it’s been ages since I cooked from this book), though all the measurements are imperial (eugh), and it’s a nice small compact book. I do remember saying that we’d cook the chicken again because it was quite tasty. Overall 3.5 stars out of 5.
Nov 01
Cookbook 126: The Crazy Dumplings Cookbook
I ended up with The Crazy Dumplings Cookbook by Amanda Roberts when I backed her second volume of dumpling recipes on Kickstarter. I like dumplings a lot, and I was intrigued by the idea that you really can fill dumplings with almost everything and they still taste amazing. Naturally I went with the non-standard dumpling fillers to see what they were like. I’m incredibly grateful to my sister, Jacinta, without whom we wouldn’t’ve had a full meal of dumplings as it really is a team effort to produce this many. We also gave up on making the dessert dumplings, though there are a lot of them in the book, because we were in pain from standing and bending over a bench (and being full of dumplings).
This book is in imperial measurements, and I’ve converted the recipes to metric, because that’s how I cook. The only exception to this was that I used a US tablespoon measure, which is 15ml. Where you see tablespoon measures below, if you don’t have a 15ml tablespoon handy (you probably shouldn’t) then use 3 teaspoons. I will share the recipe that Amanda provided (modified by me) of making your own dumpling pastry, but it’s probably easier and quicker to buy your own pre-made dumpling rounds, if you have access to a Chinese grocer. All the recipes claim to make 12 dumplings worth of filler. In my kitchen, the recipes tended to make between 18 and 24 dumplings, so make or buy more pastry than you expect. Also some of the recipes seem to have been rewritten part way through, so ingredients don’t always match the method. This was most obvious in the Roast Vegetable dumplings, and the recipe below is rewritten for consistency here. Overall I give this 4 out of 5 stars. (There are no photos below, because really dumplings all look the same)
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