Lily's Blog

It’s all Cathy’s fault

She reviewed Julie Powell’s book here. I read her review and then bought and read the book. For fun I decided to emulate Julie’s project. I cooked each recipe and various guinea-pigs tested and rated them.

Day 1 of this ‘Julie & Julia experiment’ was posted here in September. Day 22, with the final recipe was posted here last Wednesday.

We (all the guinea pigs), really liked twenty-nine of its forty-one recipes. Approximately two out of three.

Like Meat Loaf’s song – Two out of three ain’t bad!

This book definitely showed how easy it is to prepare the lovely salads, which Avoca serves in its restaurant, (and many other great salads as well). Cooking my way through this book was like being on a cookery course. This book opened my eyes to new combinations of flavours, to using ingredients, I previously only knew by name.

However I would be quite critical of this book though from a number of perspectives.

I spotted a good number of mistakes in the book.

In a previous post, I pointed out a number of errors in the table of contents. Basically, errors in the recipe listing in the table of contents, inconsistent titles of recipes between the table of contents and the recipe on the page. There’s no excuse for that. Plain proofreading was all that was required.

The recipe for Tabbouleh for four people called for a quarter of a kilogram of parsley yet only 100g of burghul wheat. This has to be wrong. Herbs weigh very little so a quarter of a kilogram of parsley is a lot of parsley! Whilst I know tabbouleh needs lots of parsley, hardly 2.5 times the weight of burghul wheat used.

If I’d prepared the tabblouleh for four, with the amount of parsley called for in the recipe, my guinea pigs would have turned green. And not with envy!

The Moroccan Couscous recipe, again for four people, calls for 125ml of olive oil to be used with one cup of couscous! This doesn’t make sense to me. Similarly the Avoca three bean salad calls for 125ml of olive oil. 125ml olive oil is 1,125 calories! I photographed that amount.

I wonder could it be that for the purposes of this book, recipes used in the cafes were adjusted for four people, but errors were made?

The title of one recipe is Mushroom, French bean and bacon. Small point is that the recipe forgot the bacon.

On this point about precision, one can get away with a ‘laid back’ approach with salads. With a bit of common sense, it’s hard to go far wrong. However with baking, one can’t be laid back. Precision is needed in baking. I notice that the production team for this book is exactly the same as that for the ‘Avoca Tea-time Treats’ book . Whilst I certainly wont test the latter book, it just makes me wonder!

The title of one recipe was Endive, Cashel blue and pear with toasted hazelnuts. Yet first up on the list of ingredients for that recipe was chicory. Whilst endive and chicory are the same, why not stick with one term?

The recipe for Minted petit pois and Swiss chard with lardons calls for Swiss chard or baby spinach in the list of ingredients. The method uses both.

The recipe for Ploughman’s lunch calls for Kilmacanogue french dressing from another page in the book. Yet when I go to that page amongst other dressings, the only French dressing is Avoca French dressing. Small point but …

I think nowadays photos beside each recipe are nearly an essential in a cookery book. I assume that the limited use of photographs in this book, was to keep its cost down. Only 13 out of 41 recipes had accompanying pictures. Fair enough.

However I would have two major criticisms with the photographs that were used.
1) The same photograph (of A simple green salad of baby leaves) was used five times in this small seventy-two page book, (front cover, inside front cover, beside introduction, beside page with recipe and on the inside back cover). I feel this was a missed opportunity to illustrate other salads.

Even when writing up the salads in this blog, I feel it was the pictures rather than the words that conveyed how wonderful the salads are.

2) Where photographs were used, for three of the salads, I noticed significant differences between the recipe described and the end product shown in the photo.

The Introduction to the book states that ‘each recipe serves four unless otherwise stated’ Whilst it is never stated otherwise, in my opinion some recipes would feed far more.

And we don’t have small appetites.

People who followed the experiment will know that some ingredients were difficult to get. Even Avoca’s own delicatessen, (which had a wide array of this type of food), didn’t stock them. Pomegranate syrup beat me, though I found a recipe for it and it was simple to make. (I felt a recipe for that should have been included). A few of the particularly difficult to get ingredients were just used in one recipe. So after the experiment I have a store cupboard of lots of unusual ingredients. (I hope they are used in the recipes we liked!)

Maybe Tommy could take harrissa sandwiches to school ☺

It sometimes felt that this book was written by a committee rather than an individual. It sometimes lacked ‘joined up’ thinking.

In my post, on the 12th October, I included photographs of the 22 recipes cooked up to then, dividing them into 18 runners, (recipes I’ll definitely cook again) and 4 non-runners.

Here are the final 19 recipes, 11 runners and 8 non-runners.

I don’t think it was that we got more fussy as time went on. Originally I had intended cooking the recipes in order, but I didn’t keep to that. In reality, I probably picked more of the nicer ones in first half.

The 11 runners

Classic Nicoise 4/5

Char-grilled chicken panzanella 4.5/5

Marinated Asian chicken and noodles 4.5/5

Ploughman’s lunch 4/5

Spiced lamb and couscous 4.5/5

Moroccan couscous 4.5/5

Minted petit pois and Swiss chard with lardons 4.5/5

Roast fennel and pepper with mangetout 4.5/5

Duck, lentil and frisee 4/5

Puy lentils, rocket and feta 4/5

Char-grilled Mediterranean vegetables 4.5/5

The 8 non-runners

Swedish potato salad with potted salmon 3/5

Mushroom, French bean and bacon 2/5

Seared spiced beef with Asian greens and noodles 3.5/5

Smoked tuna, rocket and cannellini beans 2.5/5

Chickpea and spinach salad 2/5

Beans and barley 3.5/5

Avoca three-bean 3.5/5

Chorizo, mixed bean and rocket 3.5/5

Having lived with the Avoca Salads book for the past two month, my conclusion is that it is a good book.

But it could easily have been a great book.