Cooking

Mama’s Family Cookbook Review

September 20, 2013 by Erica Hughes 1 Comment

I’m going to let you into a little secret: this is my first cookbook review. I’ve reviewed other books, but never a cookbook. Now some cookbooks make good reading and others are all about the recipes. Mama’s Family Cookbook has an introduction which tells you about the author: an Italian great grandmother from Apulia who cooks for her large, extended family on a regular basis. Aside from that introduction, Mama’s Family Cookbook is all about the food and the recipes.

The dish that really caught my eye was Penne al Pollo or Creamy Chicken Penne. I thought I’ll try that one, have a good read through the book and write my review. I tried the recipe and I was disappointed. It didn’t taste bad, but it did taste bland. Mama does suggest adding dried chillis and canned tomatoes to add depth to the sauce in a tip alongside the recipe, but this seemed to be a creating a different dish to the main recipe.

So I’m starting to feel a bit out of my depth. I’m a rookie cookbook reviewer that has tried one recipe that wasn’t much good. Do I slate the book? That seemed a bit harsh on the strength of one recipe. So I decided to try another. This time I went for Pollo alla Parmigiana or Chicken Parmesan. This was much more successful. The recipe was easy to follow and the dish had the gutsy flavours that I associate with Italian cooking, in fact it was very rich. I’d recommend serving it with a side salad, bread or lots of plainly served vegetables to mope up that deep, rich sauce.

So then I thought what does that tell the reader of my review: one dish was good and one was bland. It’s difficult to decide whether you like it or you don’t. So I decided to try another: Rigatoni ai Zucchini or Roast Courgette Rigatoni. I followed the recipe for the most part, but I added an extra clove of garlic and a bit more onion. It seemed to benefit from the slightly stronger flavour. This was a hearty, flavoursome dish that didn’t require a great deal of work.

So what did I think of Mama’s Family Cookbook overall? There were more wins than fails and I think I learnt to add more flavouring to recipes as I went along. That said, not everyone has the confidence to do this and you do expect a recipe to have been thoroughly tested before publication. I’d say it’s a good collection of Italian cookery, but feel free to experiment and make changes to suit your tastes.

I was given a copy of Mama’s Family Cookbook for the purpose of carrying out this review.

Fresh Bread

April 30, 2013 by Erica Hughes 2 Comments

Fresh bread is an everyday little luxury for me. The smell of baking bread is just divine and if it didn’t make me feel so hungry, I almost feel I could live on that alone. My fresh bread almost always comes from my breadmaker. I set it so it comes in time to present me with a fresh loaf first thing. I find this helps with the gorgeous scent of fresh bread making me hungry, because it’s breakfast time anyway when I get up so I don’t feel hungry for long. There’s something magical about getting up and smelling fresh bread which has been made for you while you slept.

Another thing that I find amazing about making my own fresh bread is that something so tasty can be created from so few ingredients. My normal white loaf, that I make most often, only contains 4 ingredients: water, flour, salt and yeast. They don’t look very promising when you put them into the bread bucket (the bit that the dough goes into that acts as mixing bowl and baking pan), but alchemy is at work to turn these humble ingredients into culinary gold.

My recipe for a simple white loaf requires the following ingredients:

350ml/ 12 fl oz water
500g/ 1lb 2oz strong white bread flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon yeast (the dried, suitable for breadmaker sort)

Put the ingredients into the bread bucket in the order they are listed. Choose the basic white bread setting for your breadmaker with a bread size of 1.5lb. Then 3 hours later you’ll have your bread. Bare in mind that it is difficult to slice when warm, so allow for some cooling time. I like eating it best when there is still a touch of residual warmth left from the cooking process, but it’s cooled enough to slice fairly easily. It doesn’t keep for too long, so eat on day 1 or 2 as fresh. After two days toast it. The toast it makes is like nectar too.

Making Homemade Chutney

November 24, 2012 by Erica Hughes Leave a Comment

This week I made a batch of homemade chutney. Some friends gave us some cooking apples from their tree and I’ve been using them for various things. I’d been putting off making the chutney, but then my Internet connection was playing up so I thought I’ll get on with preserving.

Making homemade chutney involves a lot of chopping: you need to get the ingredients cut up into small enough pieces. So make a virtue of the need to be engaged in a repetitive task: listen to a radio programme (easy to pick one you like now with the ability to pick one from the last week or so readily available); put on a favourite CD; listen to an audio book; or have a little company to talk to while you work.

I’ve been making homemade chutney for a couple of years now and have been experimenting with various recipes. This time I made Apple and Onion Chutney which uses up quite a large quantity of apples. The recipe came from this book called Jams and Chutneys, which was a Christmas present.

What do you like to do when you are chopping up your vegetables for chutney? Do you have a favourite recipe or a bible of preserving that you use?