Most weeks I'm trying to cook some stand out recipes from a cookbook. I have so many that cooking all recipes in an entire one, particularly when my audience is limited (no spicy food for one; no fish for one, etc) seems unrealistic.
So we mark the end of the first half of samples from Around the World in 450 Recipes. It's pretty expensive new, but you can get it with the resellers on amazon. My own copy was an impulse grab at Half Price Books.
The Africa-inspired cod with prawn sauce was AMAZING, and not all that complicated.
The book does leave a bit of vagueness in some of the recipes and it appears geared towards a British audience so you may have to google some ingredients to find their common American equivalent. Other than that... the fish and prawns implied throwing the garlic and onions in simultaneously, which is a common but pretty fatal culinary misdeed. So I threw the onions in about half an hour before the rest and what resulted was an incredible dish I'll make again and again.
I also made the Indonesian inspired coconut chicken and rice. That was just okay. I may have overcrowded the pan, so I'll take some credit for it.
Last recipe and one for my mom's palate: Indonesian inspired fried bananas. Many many times YES. These are so easy and so good that you'll never order out again. I made my own whipped cream from scratch since we were out of the canned, which was a nice pairing. I also went with the suggestion from Food Lab of using woks as deep fryers, which immediately made my nice deep fryer obsolete before its maiden usage. No splatter and easy to monitor temperature with an instant read thermometer.
On thermometers: I highly recommend getting an easy to use fairly inexpensive instant read one. Mine goes from -50 to 500 degrees F so can work for pretty much any kitchen use you'd want. A good thermometer is at the top of the list even above good knives and cookware for "how not to ruin food".
Next week, I'll be cooking from Smitten Kitchen Every Day. Deb Perelman, and if you don't know her blog, I have no idea how you find mine, has never submitted a recipe I've hated either in her cookbooks or on her blog. As she cooks out of a tiny apartment kitchen of the sort I was familiar with from my Brooklyn days, her recipes generally don't require a chef's kitchen's worth of appliances, ingredients, and pans. When I was doing the "one cookbook a week" with my ex husband, her first cookbook yielded the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had, so I'm looking particularly forward to this next week.
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