Food

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?

Cookbook Challenge Part 6 Joe Wicks Lean in 15

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The Sustain Plan

I’m a bit behind with writing this up as last Sunday the washing machine malfunctioned and I spent quite a lot of the day mopping the kitchen instead of writing. That and some work travel down to Slough meant that I am only just catching up, but never mind – I’ve still been cooking, just not writing about it very quickly.

This week we stayed with the healthy theme, but in contrast to last week’s old style wholefoods, we tried something more up to date. This is my younger son’s book which he got for Christmas. He’s into keeping fit, and although I would not encourage him to follow a weight loss plan and worry about how he looks in selfies, I think that learning how to cook some healthy meals and following the exercise routines in the book is great for getting him into healthy habits.

Joe Wicks has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and a website at http://www.thebodycoach.com where you can read about his diet and exercise plan. You may find the style of his writing a bit annoying if you’re not into everything being “banging” and him referring to broccoli as “midget trees”, but there is no denying that he’s successful and the recipes are tasty, easy and fun. My son helped me choose and cook these ones so it was more messy that usual, but also more entertaining.


The main course was sea bass with spiced pea and potato cakes. The recipe is supposed to only take 15 minutes, but that’s just for one person. We scaled it up for 4 and it took a lot longer. For one portion, the recipe says to cook the potato in the microwave, but for our large quantity we cooked it in a pan. That wasn’t difficult, but did take longer. We then mashed all the potato cake ingredients together and fried the cakes two at a time. The potato mixture was really soft and quite difficult to flip over in the pan and we also needed to keep the first cakes warm in the oven while we cooked the rest. It was a bit of a juggling act and it was just as well there were two of us.

The recipe said we should remove the skin from the cooked sea bass, but we left it on, partly because one of his other sea bass recipes points out that the skin is the best part so I’m not sure why you would want to take it off for this one.

It was very tasty anyway and my sons really liked it, apart from the cooked tomatoes which were “too squashy”. OK…

Dessert was peanut butter brownies. This made 16 brownies (well, 8 for us as we’re not into dainty portions) so there was no need to scale it up.

This was very easy to make. I did adjust the recipe a bit as it included chocolate protein powder which you can only buy in large tubs for about £30.  I replaced that and the almond milk with some chocolate protein shake and added some ground almonds which seemed to work fine.

We had this with vanilla ice cream (definitely not part of the Lean in 15 plan) and strawberries, which are out of season but we found some quite juicy ones. The brownies were really good, especially served warm. They had quite a light texture and lots of chocolate flavour without being too sweet and sickly.

We all enjoyed this much more than last week’s meal. The other good thing is that my son spotted a few more recipes in the book he wants to try out. By the way I did drink wine with this, which seems wrong as I don’t think that is part of the plan, but I recently received a big box of free wine – I’ll have to write another post about that!

Eighties Cooking: The Wholefood Cookery course

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Cookbook Challenge Week 5

See my previous post for more about this book

Today in the UK it’s Mother’s Day, so my dinner is being cooked for me while I sit on the sofa eating chocolates and writing about what I cooked last night. This was the least successful meal so far, and to be honest I think my family would prefer me to stay on the sofa and not make anything else from this book!

The book contains several menus and the one I picked included wholemeal vegetable pancakes with sweet and sour sauce, followed by apricot mousse. It also suggested making wholemeal melba toast with houmous, but I could not see the point of making a lovely fresh loaf just to slice it up and make dry toast, and anyway it seemed like quite enough high fibre food for one meal. Each menu includes a basic timeplan and is followed by nutritional notes. I was surprised to learn that even if I had made the full menu it would still not quite meet the recommended daily fibre allowance and most people are not eating anywhere near the guideline amounts.

Suggested Menu
Apricot Mousse
Wholemeal pancakes with sweet and sour sauce

I made the mousse earlier in the day as I needed to cook and puree the apricots (which had been soaked overnight), and having learnt from my mango ice cream experience I wanted to allow time for it to cool and set.

The apricot puree – pretty colour isn’t it? My dried apricots contained sulphur dioxide to keep the colour. Organic ones would be brown, but those are the ones to use if you are worried about allergies or sensitivities.

The recipe includes two stiffly beaten egg whites which are folded in at the end. Now, this book predates the UK ‘salmonella in eggs’ scandal of 1988, in which the Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie stated that most British eggs were contaminated with salmonella. This caused a huge scandal, a 60% reduction in egg sales and led to her resignation. Even though the statement was not actually quite correct, for years afterwards recipes warned that children, the elderly and pregnant women should not eat raw or lightly cooked eggs. Fortunately chicken farming has improved since then and in 2017 the Food Standards Agency advice was updated to say that raw eggs with the Lion mark are safe again for most people.

Here is the Lion mark on the egg box and stamped on the egg so we know it’s safe.

The vegetable stir fry included a large amount of veg (which I shredded in my food processor) but no seasoning apart from one optional clove of garlic. The sweet and sour sauce did contain salt from the shoyu, but I knew a big pile of plain vegetables was not going to go down well, so I cooked them in flavoured oil and also added a green chilli, a pinch of salt and some 5 Spice seasoning. The vegetables were fine, but the main problem with this recipe was that I really can’t make pancakes! I admit that is a problem with the cook rather than the recipe itself, but I had to make two batches before I had enough that were whole enough to wrap around the filling.

If you’ve read previous cookbook challenge posts, you may have noticed that I like to try and pair some wine with the recipes. This time it was a Gewurztraminer from the Alsace region – slightly sweet with some tropical fruit notes and often paired with spicy food and desserts including dried fruit. It was probably the best part of this meal!

  • Wholemeal vegetable pancakes with sweet and sour sauce
  • Apricot Mousse
  • Gewurztraminer

I can’t say I really enjoyed cooking this. It was extremely hot work to cook all the pancakes and them keep them warm while I cooked the stir fry and the whole thing generated a lot of washing up.

The food was not bad, but not particularly good either. My sons thought the stir fry was OK, but did not think it went well with pancakes – even though they like pancakes they would have preferred rice or noodles with this. Son two also found the sauce far too acidic even though I added extra sugar. The mousse had a good apricot flavour but was a bit intense – my eldest son ate it but didn’t ask for any more and the younger one did not like it at all.

On reflection, I don’t think I’ll be revisiting this book. It seems very much of its time, whereas now Instagram is full of posts showing far more appealing and tasty looking dishes. Healthy cooking has definitely moved on and that’s for the best. Which healthy recipe books do you recommend?