purplecat

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge

From my mother's cookbook.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I used chicken thighs as advised and substituted rice wine for sherry (since experience tells me that the appearance of sherry in any 1980s-90s asian-style recipe from the UK should probably be replaced by rice wine). I cheated and bought microwave coconut rice.

Verdict

Nice and simple chicken dish. Will make again.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

The offspring having returned to university, I am going back to cooking my way through my mother's recipe book. This looks like it has been cut out of a magazine.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Verdict: A perfectly nice chicken in a cream sauce recipe, but nothing special.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

Again this is from my mother's cookbook. It looks like a photocopy from a recipe book.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Subsitutions
I used three halved chicken thighs instead of carving up a whole chicken. As a result I was then playing fairly fast and loose with the other quantities (particularly after I dropped half the chilli/coriander mix on the floor). I still used a whole onion, but used only one tomato. Most of the herbs and spices I halved. Since I had a lot less chicken I cooked for 15 minutes before adding the coconut mix, and then only 10 minutes afterwards. This probably put more time pressure on making the coconut mix that was good for it, and I was very sparing with the coconut milk since I was wary of it getting too runny.

Verdict
It's a kind of baked curry and even with all the random I had introduced it was very nice (if a bit hot). We will make again.

The blurb in the recipe says "Kuku means chicken in Swahili. This is a coastal recipe which was brought inland by traders" which begs a lot of questions really. Is this an African dish? Is it from an African cookbook. What bit of Africa? Wikipedia suggests it is a recipe from the Indian communities on the East African Coast.

Images on the internet suggest I was too sparing with the coconut milk and could have used considerably more of it than I did.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

This is a recipe by Sophie Grigson, cut out from a newspaper by my mother. My guess, from its placement in my mother's cookbook, would be that the recipe is from the late 1980s or early 1990s. My parents took The Independent for which Sophie wrote a column in 1997-98 (according to Wikipedia) though that feels a little late to me (not impossible though). However it would appear that she's Oxford based and went to my school*, so this could conceivably be a recipe from the Oxford Times written at some earlier point in her career.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistake and Substitutions
It is relatively easy to get hold of dried apricots and apples, pears not so much and I confused dates for prunes in the store cupboard. Anyway, my dried fruit mix was apricots, apples, dates and raisins. Seemed OK. Grigson notes in the recipe that it is important to have tart fruit (particularly the apples and apricots). As usual (now) for this kind of dish we put everything in R2D2, the pressure cooker, for an hour rather than the oven for 2. In this case it may have been a mistake since the fat on the pork had not rendered down and the pork itself was still quite firm (though cooked).

Verdict
I actually liked this combination of pork and fruit, but himself assiduously separated the fruit from the gravy and took only the gravy, and then complained that the pork wasn't tender enough, so I won't be cooking it again.


* As, it appears, did Mel Giedroyc and, according to her Wikipedia page, she must have been just two years ahead of me at school. So I must have seen her around almost every day for most of my teens. Do I recognise her? nope! Rings no bells at all and it wasn't that large a school. I'd watched about five series of Bake Off before I was even aware of the connection and didn't even have that faint feeling one sometimes gets that you recognise someone from somewhere.

Cross-posted to cookbook_challenge.

From my mother's recipe book.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I mis-read the recipe and thought it said 2 old potatoes. Since I was cooking half/third quantities I only bought one potato - though since it was a baking potato I had more or less the right amount. I could not decide whether or not the chicken was supposed to be sliced (in order to make layers). In the end I sliced it. I was very generous with the tarragon, chopping up a good handful. I reduced the cooking time to around 50 minutes and then forgot the final step (though, to be honest, I didn't have a lot of tarragon butter left).

Verdict
I didn't actually have high hopes of this, thinking it would be rather heavy on the cream and potato and probably a bit bland, but actually we really liked it. It wasn't particularly in your face, but it had a nice flavour and didn't feel too heavy at all.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

From my mother's recipe book. This is a print recipe, glued in, but it doesn't look like it comes from a newspaper or magazine. My guess is it is photocopied from a recipe book, though the quality looks a bit good for a 50 year old photocopy.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

From my mother's cookbook (handwritten).

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Subsitutions
To be honest we followed step 1 and then instantly diverged since we wanted to play with R2D2 (given to himself by his Mum as a Christmas present).



This is R2D2.


R2D2 has a saute mode, so we put the oil, butter and lamb into R2D2 and sauted for a bit. We did not worry about over-cooking the spices because, in our experience, spices losing their taste if over-cooked isn't a thing (unless completely burnt, of course). We skipped sweating the veg because we thought it a pointless step, so we just put everything in R2D2 at this point and pressure cooked for 40 minutes. We did add quite a bit more stock since we didn't want the thing to boil dry. This was a mistake and we had too much liquid at the end which then didn't thicken. In retrospect we should have poured away half of it and then thickened the remainder, though given neither of us was familiar with arrowroot, that probably didn't help either.

Verdict
A success, despite the watery gravy.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

I picked this out of the "Vegetables" section of my mother's cookbook, partly because I was charmed by the description. It's another newspaper cutting that starts:

"Courgettes are the midget marrows you see in most greengrocers at this time of the year. At 10p per lb. you get quite a lot for your money."

Charmed both by the price and by the need to introduce the courgette as a kind of marrow, rather than vice versa. My father grew marrows in the garden and there's a stuffed marrow recipe in here I'd quite like to try* but marrows are a lot harder to find these days than courgettes.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Mistakes, Changes and Substitutions
This felt a little like a Bake Off technical challenge. How many courgettes? how hot an oven? how long in the oven to "gratinate" (not a word I had come across before though its meaning is clear). Anyway we used four courgettes which seemed about the right amount for the amount of stuffing we had, and we baked them at 180C for 20 minutes in the oven which seemed to work.

I did not pipe the stuffing because I don't have a piping bag or nozzle though, frankly, if I'd been going to pipe it, I would have whizzed the lot in the food mixer before the attempt

Verdict
An odd one this. We liked the stuffed courgette idea and we liked the stuffing itself (I have a Delia pasta recipe that makes a mushroom sauce in a similar way) but weren't entirely convinced by them together - it was fine just not more than the sum of its parts, if you see what I mean. Our Rose Elliot book has several stuffed courgette recipes in it, so we may try some of them.

*I feel very nostalgic about it despite the fact I was a fussy eater as a child and hated it.

Cross-posted to cookbook_challenge.

This is from my mother's cookbook written in her own hand-writing. Judging from where it turns up, I suspect it is a recipe from the 1970s. Aphelia is probably the source of the recipe but I have no idea if that is a person, a magazine, or something else - probably a person though the name is unusual and I don't recall my mother ever mentioning an Aphelia.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
We had some discussion above whether "Doz coriander seeds" was some number of ounces, or a dozen. In the end we decided it was a dozen. I then decided to crush the coriander seeds and a similar number of peppercorns together with a pestle and mortar rather than having them floating whole in the casserole (I think this was a good choice). The recipe didn't say to chop the onions, though it did say to chop the green pepper, but I couldn't imagine that the onions weren't supposed to be chopped as well. I skipped the lemon rind since I was using shop bought lemon juice rather than an actual lemon.

Verdict
This was a perfectly nice but not very exciting pork casserole. The pork was a little dry but I think that was because "lean stir fry pork" was substituted for the stewing pork I'd ordered from Sainsbury's and I suspect the whole would have benefitted from more fat.

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

From The Roasting Tin around the World by Rukmini Iyer

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I didn't make many changes here. I left the optional macadamia nuts optional.

Verdict
Another recipe we liked. I think the South-East Asian recipes from this book have, so far, been among the most successful which main, in part, be novelty.