Requiring a little more skill, patience, and/or time.
I adapted this dish from Nigella’s book Feast: because we could not find the lamb, we used beef; and I changed a few other details, small things. The flavours were fantastic, certainly one to repeat.
The amount of chili was just above my level; I had to make small breaks during eating because my mouth was on fire.
Take some curly pasta, a rich tomato sauce, cover it with cheese, and bake in the oven. What’s not to love?
I consider this one of my great achievements: I can now make pasta without too much stress, even for a dinner party. There are a few gadgets that help me on my way, the most important one being the KitchenAid pasta attachment. I can really recommend it!
The recipe I use is from the tried and tested book Made in Italy, page 330. I cannot add to or substract from this recipe, but I am too lazy to retype it; instead, here is another very similar version.
This cake is a classic, and for all the right reasons. And if you make it with shop-bought puff pastry, it makes for quite an easy and impressive dessert.
I am kicking myself now for not taking a photo when I made this, but I was so into it at the dinner party where I made it, I simply forgot. It looked stunning, and I am sure there will be additional opportunities to take photos.
This dish is a combination of two recipes from a cookbook I recently discovered entitled “How to be a better cook.” I like how the dishes are simple, classic, and yet innovative. The book is intended to be a guide for those that do not dare enter the kitchen; indeed, the concept of the show that bares the same name is to take a newbie cook (i.e., someone who thinks that cooking an omelet is easy) and teaching them how to make a three-course meal from scratch.
If you ever wondered how to cram as much butter in a cake per cubic centimeter, wonder no more.
This recipe is based on a cake presented by Michel Roux Jr. on the BBC show Food and Drink. I suppose Michel Roux was targeting the Brit’s soft spot for preserved fruits when he constructed the recipe. But for me, the more intriguing part of the recipe was the French bit: frangipane and shortcrust pastry.
What attracted me in this dish was the whimsical name, but the flavour is what will make me come back to it over and over again. I cooked this dish for the first time for a goodbye dinner party, a bit of a risk, but the risk paid off with interest: I am sure I will be cooking this protein-rich vegetarian dish over and over again.
The macro is strong in this one
This is the first time I think I really nailed an Indian dish. Normally there is that little something missing, but this time I think the depth of flavour was there.
In my head, I am comparing it to a dish I had last week, when I went with a colleague to a restaurant near the office. The version there was excellent in flavour and the inspiration for tonight’s experiment. In contrast to my version, however, it was radioactive red; nevertheless, I think my humble interpretation is not lagging behind in flavour.
Ah, a real Italian dish… NOT! But still a very tasty and comforting dish to warm a chilly and rainy day in June. This is a Jamie Oliver’s recipe that you can find in his book Jamie’s Ministry of Food, subtitled Anyone Can Learn to Cook in 24 Hours. I own a German translation of this book: I bought it in the vain hope it will improve my German. It did not. I wonder if it taught anyone to cook in 24 hours…
It seems that Australia claims this recipe as its own; there, these small coconut dredged cakes are known as lamingtons. In Croatia, we have a similar cake—and when I say similar, I mean the same—and we call it čupavci. The Croatian version I know does not have a chocolatey centre, but the lamington version that I found does, so I decided to give it a go.