At least not the one I used last night. Remember how I said the Murdoch Press book ‘Home Food’ was great? I was wrong. It’s great for inspiration and contains plenty of things a good cook should have in their repetoire, but as far as the actual recipes go, I’m not at all convinced.

I think I’ve already mentioned the disastrous kedgeree recipe which I followed two years ago. To be fair, if I hadn’t looked in that book, I’d never have heard of kedgeree, but I’m certainly never going to use it’s recipe again. Last night I had a similar experience.

The dish in question was farfalle with tiger prawns, horeradish and lemon. So you’d think it would be a zesty and powerful dish with a real kick to it, right? Wrong! It was stiflingly bland. I added extra horseradish and lemon but it didn’t help much. In the end I added a bit of dijon mustard, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. After that the pasta was alright, not great,  but at least it had some flavour. 

I n general, I’m not the type of cook that follows recipes to the letter. I tend to look over them and then invent my own dish based loosely around the suggested flavours. Last night’s cooking reminded me why. Everytime I faithfully follow instructions things don’t work. This doesn’t bother me particularly as I find it’s much more fun to be creative in cooking and the results are always better, but I know lots of people who will slavishly copy what it says in the book. I wonder how they cope. Maybe this is why some people claim they can’t cook- they’re following recipes which, frankly, don’t work.