cookbooks

Exploring Mauritian Cuisine: A Culinary Adventure

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Cookbook Challenge Part 14: Sunshine on a Plate by Shelina Permalloo

Last November, we went on a long awaited holiday to Mauritius. It was our first time there and one of the things we were most looking forward to was trying some Mauritian food.

Mauritian food reflects the country’s varied cultural mix and includes culinary traditions from India, China, Africa and France. When you travel around the island, it’s easy to see how the cuisine is inspired by the sunny weather, relaxing atmosphere and colourful produce.

Our hotel was all- inclusive and we found the buffet included a wide variety of dishes, including lots of Indian curries, salads, tropical fruit and creole specialities. We ate there a lot, but also tried some other restaurants, street food and of course a few trips to the local market and the supermarket for some Mauritian snacks and drinks.

Some street food and snacks from local stalls and restaurants

Colourful Shopping at the market

After a trip somewhere new, I enjoy trying to recreate the food I’ve had there, so I was happy to receive this book of Mauritian recipes for Christmas.

The book is full of colourful recipes, some with meat, which I don’t eat, but also plenty of fish and vegetable based dishes, desserts and drinks.

I decided to make cari des oeufs, which is a simple egg and pea curry and also some roti, which I’ve never made from scratch before.

We enjoyed quite a few different curries while we were on holiday and various types of bread. We noticed that bread of all types seemed very popular and even the small local supermarket had a bakery for people to pick up freshly baked baguettes. Maybe that’s because of the French influence, as Mauritius was a French colony from 1715 until 1810 and thirty percent of international visitors are from France.

The egg curry included Mauritian curry powder, a fragrant blend of spices which some people grind and smoke themselves. The book gives instructions for making your own from scratch if you have a spice grinder, but also a cheats version using ready ground curry powder with some extra spices. I made the simple version, but I’ve now bought myself a spice grinder so I can try a more authentic version next time.

The recipe made a large amount of curry powder, so I saved the rest in a jar and have been adding it to all our curries. It’s definitely made them more interesting than using a standard curry powder.

The curry base of spices, onions, chilli and tomatoes, cooking before the peas and eggs were added.

I hadn’t realised it’s so easy to make your own roti with just flour, oil, salt and water. I’ve made them several times since and experimented with wholemeal and spelt flour to give a different flavour and texture.

The recipe included 1tbsp of salt for 300g flour, which seemed like far too much to me. I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or if they are supposed to be salty, but I reduced it to 1 tsp.

The finished dish, served with the roti

We really enjoyed this curry. Have you been to Mauritius? What foods did you enjoy?

Use Your Cookbooks

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Cookbook Challenge reboot

Are you a recipe book collector like me? How often do you actually use your cookbooks ?

In 2019 I started a project to try and cook a meal from every recipe book I own. It was fun and I managed twelve meals from different books. I think that was a pretty good effort, although it was still only a small part of my collection.

You can read a bit more about why I originally started this in this post: Cookbook Challenge Introduction

After 2019, life got in the way and I stopped blogging. Work, a global pandemic and a bereavement all limited my ability to focus.

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly had the urge to log into the blog again. It didn’t look too bad, so since I was there I thought I may as well carry on. This time I have an even bigger collection of books, some of them bought for me with the expectation that I might actually cook something and write about it. I have a new kitchen too, with more fridge and oven space, some pan drawers and a fancy tap.

The first decision was which book to cook from. I was thinking of using one I recently inherited from my Mum, but seeing her notes in the margins was too much. I’ll come back to those another time. Instead I picked this book, mainly because of the colourful cover which I hadn’t opened for some time.

Years ago at Avebury in Wiltshire, just next to the famous stone circle, there was a vegetarian restaurant that served the kind of substantial vegetarian dishes popular in the nineties. This was when vegan meat substitutes and Quorn were still niche products. You could get soya mince and veggie burgers, but most vegetarian meals were made up of, well, vegetables, maybe some cheese, and bulked up with plenty of carbs.

The restaurant owners published three books as far as I know, all out of print now. This one is from 1995. The restaurant closed in 2000 but the building is now a cafe serving coffee, cakes and light lunches for the stone circle visitors.

If you’ve never been to Avebury, you should. It’s better than Stonehenge I think – bigger and you can wander amongst the stones and even touch them if you like. The photo is from what must have originally been a long avenue leading to the circle. Even with crowds of visitors (out of shot here), it’s dramatic and mysterious.

Oh yes, I have to write about what I actually cooked – follow along for the update!

Will you be inspired to use your cookbooks too?

Forever Summer by Nigella Lawson

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Cookbook Challenge Part 12

I am not very good at winter. I don’t like cold, or damp, or dark evenings and I miss green leaves and colourful flowers and bare feet. At the point when I finally had to admit that summer was really over, this felt like a good book to revisit. As soon as I opened it I wondered why I hadn’t thought of going back to it before – every picture is glowing with light and colour and promises of summer flavours. The blurb says, ‘Forever Summer is all about how to prolong that lazy, warm summer feeling through the darker days of winter’. That’s enough to convince me.

This time I chose a three-course dinner, partly because we had a guest but also because this starter sounded so good that I just really needed to try it. It’s baked ricotta with grilled radicchio.

I used red chicory, which according to Wikipedia is the same thing as radicchio. On Ocado however, radicchio was about three times as expensive, making that decision very easy.

You beat the ricotta with egg whites before baking it with thyme and lemon zest, so it makes a sort of savoury cheesecake. In fact, the appearance reminded me of the cheesecake I made some time ago for cookbook number 3 https://bexknits.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/ottolenghi-simple/

It didn’t taste similar of course – both recipes included thyme, but the effect was completely different. The baked cheese tasted fantastic! It was intensely savoury but slightly tangy and not too heavy.

The grilled chicory we will put down as ‘interesting’. It was a good contrast to the cheese, and the oil, herbs and lemon took away some of the bitterness. My husband, older son and our dinner guest thought it was OK, but it was too strong for me and my equally bitter- sensitive younger son. If I did this again I would just go with a green salad.

The main course was sea bass with saffron, sherry and pine nuts. I liked the idea of using sultanas with fish, which I don’t think I’ve done before. I bought the fish ready filleted, but I did have to skin it, hence the sharp knife. Apart from the fish- skinning this was really easy, although the fish did fall apart a bit when I lifted it out of the frying pan.

Here’s the sherry I used. It has a lovely slightly nutty flavour and I found it was perfect for sipping whilst cooking.

I served this with basmati rice as suggested, but not the lentils which would have been too much as part of a three course meal I think. We just had some broccoli on the side.

It was quite a nice golden colour, but you can’t really see it well here. I should have put it against a blue background as they did for the book. New blue plates needed!

Everyone liked this one. It had a delicate, slightly exotic flavour and the sultanas balanced the earthy saffron taste. It definitely needed the crunchy pine nuts for contrast.

And now dessert, which I had to make earlier in the day as you can’t rush a meringue. This is a chocolate raspberry pavlova and those three words were all the encouragement I needed to make this.

The meringue contains cocoa powder and dark chocolate which needed to be finely chopped. I used the mezzaluna which I usually chop herbs with and that worked quite well, apart from the odd chocolate splinter flying across the kitchen. It’s from Nigella’s kitchenware range as well, so it seemed appropriate to use it here.

The recipe requires six egg whites and I also needed another two for the ricotta, so I bought a carton which was much more convenient than having eight leftover yolks.

The cooled meringue was so light and fragile that it cracked very easily when I transferred it to a plate (with the Bake Off move in which you turn the plate upside down and look scared). The one in the book looks cracked too, so I’m sure it’s fine. I also overwhipped the cream because I still forget how powerful my Kenwood Chef is and I forgot to sprinkle grated chocolate over the top.

None of that mattered though, because this tasted incredible. The meringue was so light and crisp and dotted with little pieces of chocolate that melted in the mouth. The raspberries were just tangy enough to stop the whole thing being too sweet and sickly. Possibly the best dessert yet.

In all a very successful meal. Did it make me feel summery? I’m not sure, but it certainly made me happy.

Slimming World Veggie Deluxe

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Cookbook challenge part 11

Cookbook number 11 is a Slimming World vegetarian book. I lost 28lb with Slimming World and it wasn’t too painful. The plan is designed around cooking and eating normal meals, so it’s ideal for people who love food. Since loving food is what led to me carrying the extra weight (well, that and having two babies), it definitely worked for me.

If you eat meat there are lots of Slimming World options – you can have steak, roast chicken or even a bacon sandwich. I don’t eat any of those things so it’s useful to have a book full of veggie ideas. This book doesn’t include any desserts, although there are many Slimming World friendly dessert options you could make if you wanted. I decided to have a starter instead this time.

A very straightford creamy dip with roasted root vegetables to start. This was supposed to also have parsnips and sweet potatoes, but I just did carrots because of my sons’ weird aversion to sweet vegetables. The vegetables were roasted with spices, lime juice and fat free vinaigrette. I would never have thought of using vinaigrette in this way but it worked really well.

The dip was made from fat free fromage frais and lots of garlic. It tasted quite creamy – I don’t think you would have guessed it was fat free. This made a large amount of dip, but fortunately everyone liked it and asked to have it again.

The main course was this cheesy mexican bake. I did realise that this wasn’t going to work for everyone in our house as it includes not only artichoke hearts but also red and yellow pepper, celery and courgette. It does have cheese though, which usually makes everything better. It also uses tinned potatoes, which I always think taste a bit strange, but I think raw ones wouldn’t have cooked before the rest was overdone so I followed the recipe.

As predicted, this was not very popular with my sons. We quite liked it though, so a fifty percent success rate is acceptable. I thought maybe it would be a bit like having nachos, but it wasn’t of course, the sauce was quite runny. It was still tasty and had a bit of spice, although I felt it was improved by adding hot sauce. Many things are improved by hot sauce in my opinion!

If you were cooking for people who are less fussy about particular vegetables then this would make a good meal. It was filling, especially with all the dip as well and the flavours worked well.

I think the next cookbook needs to please everyone, so let’s see what I can do!