You may remember reading my blog post about my attending the My Halal Kitchen cooking demo a few weeks back. Well, I have been busy reading and cooking from it and am happy to report my findings below.

In case you haven’t heard of Yvonne Maffei, she is a cookbook author and the person behind myhalalkitchen.com. Wildly popular with over a million followers on Facebook, Yvonne is an expert at morphing recipes to suit the halal cook. French and Latin cuisine often have wine and pork as central to the dish and she provides artful substitutions with fruit juice and breakfast strips.

cooking with my halal kitchen

 recipes i tried

• Shrimp Pad Thai, pg. 112
• Sweet and Sour Chicken, pg. 114
• Sweet and Sour Sauce, pg. 103
• Mascarpone Cheese, pg. 36

My first encounter with  Shrimp Pad Thai was at a friend’s son’s birthday party and I fell in love! So when I saw the recipe in Yvonne’s book, I knew it would be the first one I tried. I made it for dinner and got rave reviews from my family. My husband even commented that it is something he would expect to eat at a restaurant, it was that authentic. This despite the fact that I used vermicelli rice noodles instead of the signature pad thai and left the peanut out due to allergy.

The recipe was easy enough to follow but make sure to read the recipe through once and have all your ingredients ready. Follow the steps Yvonne has listed in order to achieve success, especially if trying your hand at Thai cooking for the first time.

As you can see, we clearly love Asian food in my home! Sweet and Sour Chicken was a total hit as well. The only thing I would change is the amount of sweet and sour sauce as the amount that was called for in the recipe was a tad sweet for us. That is just a personal preference.

The sauce itself was super simple to make and saved me a trip to the grocery store. Not to mention the added preservatives and chemicals that go into commercially processed sauces.

Next up, Mascarpone cheese! So good! A cheaper option to what’s available in stores. I’m sold! It was silky and smooth and so easy to make! I made some so that I could try out the tiramisu next!

The Final Takeaway

I could easily call My Halal Kitchen my handy guide to cooking halal and healthy, two words that should be synonymous to a Muslim but seem to have lost that connection in most homes. This not entirely intentional but often out of ignorance of what goes into commercially manufactured food. Yvonne seems to have filled that gap quiet beautifully with extensive research on “problematic ingredients” that taint our food supply today.

Her cookbook is easy to navigate for Muslims and non- Muslims alike. She gives tips on “buying halal”, “setting up a halal kitchen” and even has a chapter dedicated to educating anyone new to the concept of halal in “Halal 101”. I especially love how she encourages “going back to the basics” and provides ways to achieve that in “tips for buying halal”.

From easy and quick recipes to harder more involved ones, Yvonne’s got them all covered. As an observant Muslim. I know I would take the time to try these recipes at home, assured that my efforts will yield a delicious, authentic meal with flavors that are true to the region to which the food belongs.

Of course the research that has been put into this book shines through and deserves much appreciation and respect not only from the Muslim community but any conscientious foodie. For moms like me who want to feed their kids healthy whole some meals it is a true treasure.

I look forward to trying the rest of the recipes in Yvonne’s book and have full confidence that they will turn out just as fabulous as the ones I have tested so far.

You can get a copy of the book on myhalalkitchen.com and  Amazon.