cookbook_challenge | Entries tagged with main dish

Japanese Curry (S&B Golden Curry)

I finally tried making the curry recipe on the side of the S&B Golden Curry box.

Ingredients (5 servings)

Beef (or chicken, lamb, shrimp), chopped - 450 g/1 lb (I used beef)
medium onions, minced - 1 3/4 (350 g/13 oz)
medium carrot, chopped - 1/2 (100 g/3.5 oz)
medium potato, chopped - 1 (150 g/5 oz)
Vegetable oil - 1 Tbsp
Water - 540 ml
S&B Golden Curry Sauce Mix 92 g - 1 pack

Directions

1. Stir-fry meat and vegetables with oil in a large skillet on medium heat for approx. 5 min.

2. Add water and bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until ingredients are tender, approx. 15min.

3. Turn the heat off, break S&B Golden Curry Sauce Mix into pieces and add them to the skillet. Stir until sauce mixes are completely melted. Simmer approx. 5 min., stirring constantly.

4. Serve hot over rice or noodles.

I didn't use the exact vegetable amounts, but close, and we had it over rice. I think it turned out really well. My mother had never had curry before, except at the Thai restaurant, and was hesitant to try it, but ended up really liking it.

watersword

From the NYT.

( ingredients )

( paraphrased method )

( notes, substitutions, etc. )

spiralicious

Confetti Frittata
The Adventurous Eaters Club by Misha & Vicki Collins

Ingredients:
1 leaf Swiss or rainbow chard
6 eggs
1 cup milk
Sea salt to taste
2 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup grated mild Cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated Swiss cheese or Gruyere cheese

Preheat oven to 350° f.

Wash and dry the chard. Hold the stem at the bottom, like a handle, in one hand. Use your other hand to tear the leaf away from the stem in one swoop. Set aside the stem or use it for a duel. Using child scissors, snip off tiny pieces of the leaf to make teeny green confetti. Set aside. (They assume a child is helping you.)

Combine the eggs, milk, and salt in a medium mixing bowl and wisk until well mixed.

Melt the butter in a medium-sized pan (preferably cast iron) over medium heat. Swirl the butter so it coats all sides of the pan. Once the pan is evenly coated, pour the excess melted butter into the whisked eggs and give them a stir. Set aside.

Add the chard confetti to the pan and stir until just wilted. If there's water in the pan after sauteing the greens, press the greens into the pan with a spatula and tip the pan to pour out the excess into the sink.

Pour the egg mixture into the pan. Top one side of the pan with cheddar and the other with Swiss or gruyere. Pop the pan in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Stick a toothpick in the middle: if it comes out mostly clean, it's ready.

Let the frittata cool for a few minutes, then slice into wedges and serve.

Notes:
While my sister turned her nose up at this, my mother and I enjoyed it, and my mother would like this in regular rotation. I did have to sub the chard for okra and the Swiss cheese for a very similar cheese. Even using a cast iron pan, 2 tablespoons of butter was excessive, but it didn't hurt anything.

I had to "talk to type" this to type it and I think I caught all the typos, but if there are any, that's why.

purplecat

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.

purplecat

I realise that this page of Mum's recipe book contains no less than four chicken recipes, all in the same font and cut from a magazine. I hypothesise some kind of "things to do with chicken" article. The jury is still out on whether I'll attempt the other two - a tagine and a slightly tame looking Thai poached chicken. Anyway, Chicken and Mushroom pie is a classic, so I thought I might as well.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I didn't have any shredded cooked chicken thigh meat to hand so I diced some chicken thighs and fried them first. I was very suspicious of the lack of any seasoning beyond two rosemary sprigs and so added a pinch of salt and a generous grinding of pepper to the mixture before I put it in the pie dish.

Verdict
The puff pastry didn't really puff, but I suspect that isn't necessarily the recipe's fault but more, perhaps, a comment on the quality of ready-rolled puff pastry - or possibly I took it out of the fridge too soon. Otherwise this was perfectly nice and very decorative. Will make again.

purplecat

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.

purplecat

From my mother's cookbook. Apparently this is from page 70 of the Sainsbury's Vitality Cookbook. Amazon tells me this was published in 1993 so we can safely assume, I think, that this recipe is from the mid-1990s.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I made this pretty much as directed - though I steamed the broccoli and I suspect the recipe expected it to be boiled.

Verdict
A simple recipe (albeit one that ends up using quite a few pots and pans). For the effort involved it's probably worth it for a simple everyday dish. I haven't quite decided whether I'd want to make it again though.

watersword

From the NYT.

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons canola oil
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 pound baby bok choy, halved lengthwise
Kosher salt and black pepper
¼ cup oyster sauce
1 tablespoon low-sodium soy sauce
1 ½ pounds boneless, skinless cod fillets, cut crosswise into 2-inch pieces
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon lime juice
Cooked rice, soba or egg noodles, for serving

NYT method, paraphrased:
Sauté garlic and ginger in oil until fragrant. Add bok choy and cook, stirring frequently, until tender, and remove to a plate. Add oyster sauce and soy sauce and bring to a simmer, add fish. Simmer for ten minutes, turning halfway through, spooning sauce on top. Add lime juice and butter and simmer until thickened, approximately two minutes. Serve over rice.

Modifications and notes:
This was so good, although I (a) was very hungry, (b) used it more as an inspiration than a recipe, and (c) already knew I adored greens with oyster sauce. Modifications included substituting yu choy for bok choy, and J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce from his new book The Wok for the sauce (he adds cornstarch, water, and sugar to the oyster/soy mixture, and mixes it beforehand instead of in the pan) and adopted his method of a quick blanching for the greens before sautéeing. I didn't bother with the butter-and-lime step, instead drizzling some sesame oil and lemon juice (which I prefer to lime) over the dish to serve, and used bacon fat instead of canola oil, to get some smokiness. My fish broke up when I tried to flip it, but I think I cut the pieces smaller than I was meant to, and they cooked through very quickly. I want another serving right now.

Mods, can we have a "fish" tag?

purplecat

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.

purplecat

From my mother's cookbook. There is a note at the top that says "can't freeze", though I can't see anything obvious in the recipe that would make it unsuitable for freezing.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substutions
I went with the soy sauce version of the recipe since I have soy sauce in the house and not cream sherry. I also forgot to keep the root ends of the onions intact - though to be honest, I'm dubious about the desirability of this. I'm not sure I want to be fishing large quarters of onion out of a casserole and then cutting the root off in order to eat them.

Now we have R2D2 the instant pot, the attraction of waiting an hour and half for a casserole has lessened, so I put the whole lot in R2D2 for 40 minutes. At the end of cooking we suddenly discovered we had no cornflour so we skipped the entire final step. This didn't seem to make that much difference.

Verdict
We have a lot of casserole/stew recipes in our repertoire. This is in part, I think, because they are relatively simple to prepare and very forgiving in terms of time needed to cook. So we had a bit of a discussion after making this about whether we really needed yet another casserole recipe. Final verdict was that we didn't actually have that many pork recipes and so this has been put into the rotation.

watersword

From The New York Times.
( ingredients )
( paraphrased method )
( notes )

purplecat

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.

purplecat

From my mother's cookbook. Handwritten.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I didn't have button mushrooms so sliced regular white mushrooms. Seemed to work. Skipped the parsley.

Verdict
A nice sauce for pork. I think if I had a lot of similar recipes, I might not make again, but I actually don't have a lot of recipes for pork chops, so this will probably go in the rotation.

melannen

This is part of my project of cooking something from one of my pre-1969 cookbooks every week to go with our Star Trek rewatch. It is from Carnation's Easy-Does-It Cookbook from 1958, which I pulled off the shelf because I had two cans of evaporated milk we'd bought in a fit of preparedness that are about to expire.

Except the Carnation cookbook does not appear to have any evaporated or condensed milk recipes in it??

Either what they're calling "Carnation homogenized milk" means "evaporated milk" - which doesn't really make sense with the recipes - or it was part of a marketing push when they put out a bunch of other product lines and were trying to redefine Carnation as more than just canned milk products.

So anyway this is basically a shepherd-pie sort of thing, except that there is inexplicably cottage cheese in the mashed potatoes. We could not figure out why there was cottage cheese in the mashed potatoes. You could not taste it. You could see weird small white cubes in the mashed potatoes, but I could not see how this added to the dish, or made it more 'snowcapped' either?

Anyway I have cottage cheese left over so we're doing another 'why is there cottage cheese in this' recipe from this book tomorrow too.

2 cups/1 can green beans (drained)
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 1/2 lbs ground beef
2 slices bread
1/4 tsp pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups condensed tomato soup
2 cups mashed potatoes
1 cup Carnation Cottage Cheese
1/2 tsp garlic salt

Place green beans and onion in bottom of 8 individual casseroles. Brown beef in frying pan. Cut bread into cubes.
Mix beef, bread, salt, pepper, and soup. Spoon over green beans.
Combine potatoes, cottage cheese, egg, and garlic salt. Spoon over meat mixture.
Bake casseroles in moderate oven (350 deg F) for 30 minutes. Garnish with parsley.

Changes: I didn't have 8 individual casseroles, so I put it all together in one old Corningware casserole dish. It might actually look more like snow-capped mountains if you put them in individual casseroles and were artistic with the mashed potatoes. Also I didn't have garlic salt so I put in salt and powdered garlic instead. And, being a terrible American, I still don't have a kitchen scale, so I estimated the hamburger. And I used frozen parsley and put it on before the cooking was finished.

Like a lot of these old recipes I've tried, I like that it's easy and mostly uses stuff I keep in the pantry, and it's clearly designed not for someone who wants to Cook, just someone who got home from work and needs to get a filling meal on the table and doesn't have any energy or a microwave.

Also like a lot of these recipes, it was fine? It was filling and comfort-food-y and not terrible? But hard to justify why it was worth making this instead of just heating up some beans and potatoes and meat and putting ketchup on the side.

purplecat

From my mother's cookbook. Handwritten, but not in her handwriting. Since I was a little dubious about the whole thing, I looked Bobotee up on the Internet. Apparently it is a South African dish (or at least something called Bobotie is) so I'm guessing it comes from a university friend of Mum's who emigrated to South Africa to get married just after she graduated.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
As usual I used bottled lemon juice rather than the real thing. There was some debate about what the unknown recipe writer might have considered curry powder. In the end we mixed some garam masala and chilli powder and went with that. There was further debate around whether the intention was that it should be covered while cooking and a general feeling that over an hour was a long time to cook something like this. In the end we cooked it for about 20 minutes uncovered before pouring in the rest of the liquid and then a further 10 minutes (also uncovered) after that. It was a little dry, but not a disaster. The internet suggests the final effect should be a layer of mince, with a baked egg layer on top which was not what we ended up with. I think maybe I would need to pack the down mince a bit more in the dish.

If I made it again I would probably cover and cook for around 40 minutes and then pour on the remaining liquid and cook for a further 10-15 minutes uncovered until the top was a nice colour.

Verdict
An interesting dish, but it also felt a bit flat somehow. It's gone on a list of "we'll make this one more time and then decide".

purplecat

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).

An Instant Pot designed to look like R2D2

An Instant Pot designed to look like R2D2

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.

purplecat

This is again from Mum's recipe book and I think we are still in the 1970s, though we may be moving into the 1980s. Certainly Mum was never much interested in vegetarian cookery until she gained a vegetarian son-in-law-to-be in the mid 1990s so I'm expecting the "Vegetables" section of her book (which this comes from) to be a bit sparser than the "Meat" section.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
On the assumption this is a recipe from an age where the British boiled any vegetable to death before doing anything else with it, I only parboiled the potatoes for 10 minutes and didn't parboil the courgette at all.

I was using half quantities but was generous with the breadcrumbs, cheese and water.

Verdict
Well, obviously, this is bake not a casserole. Other than that it was unobjectionable but dull.

purplecat

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.

purplecat

From my mother's cookbook. This is a newspaper clipping of unknown provenance. It starts by stating the recipe is from "Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen" so I had some hopes of dating the clipping by googling the recipe book. However it transpires that Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen was first published in 1899 and my mother is not that old.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I did not pre-cook the chicken. I was using breast and didn't want it to dry out and figured if it was finely chopped it would cook just fine. I also substituted arborio rice for long grain rice since the stuffing was described as a risotto.

We were a little dubious about boiling the peppers before we stuffed them (not something we normally do with stuffed peppers) and indeed one did fall apart when I drained it, but the others were fine and I think it just needed a little more care.

I also filled the peppers to the top. I hadn't even noticed it said three-quarters until I ran out of risotto - however given one pepper had fallen apart anyway this wasn't a disaster.

Verdict
As this reviewer notes, it is difficult to imagine this as a Victorian recipe, it feels very modern, which just goes to show, I suppose, that modernity is not as novel as we might think. Obviously the unknown newspaper columnist may have updated the recipe (the mention of using a stock cube, for instance) but I'm sure the essence of the idea of stuffing peppers with risotto must date back.

We really liked it, and also thought the general concept was an interesting one and are now contemplating our various other risotto recipes with a viewing to stuffing them into peppers.

purplecat

From The Roasting Tin around the World by Rukmini Iyer. This will be the last recipe from this book I post. Truth be told, I'm feeling a little embarrassed about posting so many, even though I was/am cooking my way through it and the challenge comm specifies these should be recipes you were intending to try. If you've liked these recipes can I suggest you purchase a copy of the book since it is currently in print? I have just acquired my Mum's cookbook though, so I think next year, I will try cooking my way (selectively) through that.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
I made half quantities of the veg, but full quantities of the liquid. Sainsbury's delivered regular red peppers instead of pointy peppers, so I quartered these and used instead. I also quartered rather than halved the onion. I used 2 tsps of garlic paste and 2 tsps ginger paste instead of grating fresh. The change that made the most difference, I suspect, and which I didn't think much of at the time, was that I selected my largest casserole dish with a lid and used that instead of a roasting tin with foil. Although large, the vegetables weren't in one layer. The result was that the vegetables that cooked in the liquid were properly cooked and had a nice sweet and sour flavour, while the ones that weren't were a bit under-cooked and dull.

Verdict
The verdict is mixed, probably because of the issue with the layers during cooking. I shall make again and see what its like when all the vegetables are in the liquid.

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Cookbook challenge

Make new recipes you already own!

Entries tagged with main dish

Japanese Curry (S&B Golden Curry)

Coconut-Poached Fish With Bok Choy

Confetti Frittata

Ginger Chicken with Coconut Rice

Chicken and Mushroom Pie

Kuku Paka

Broccoli and Ham Gratin

Oyster sauce cod and greens

Memories of a Silesian Heaven

Pork and Parsnip Casserole

Chicken Thighs With Coconut Creamed Corn

Chicken Dauphinoise

Pork in Cider Sauce

Snow-Capped Casseroles

Bobotee

Spiced Leg of Lamb

Courgette, Potato and Cheese Casserole

Stuffed Courgettes

Peperoni Farciti

Cuban-Style Sweet and Sour Squash with Peppers and Basil

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February 2024

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