Sunday, August 28, 2011

I bet you didn't think I could cook, huh? Well, you're right...

Friday night, while other shoppers were raking toilet paper, gallons of milk, water, and oddly enough microwave popcorn into their shopping carts, I was wandering around with a very specific grocery list. Instead of Hurricane Irene freakout supplies I was loading up on strange cheeses I had never heard of and the makings of cornmeal pizza dough. Since most of my meals come from a box or can (or bottle, *gratuitous wink*), recently I've renewed my interest in cooking and I thought while I was home bound during the storm, I would recreate a recipe I found in a discarded cookbook earlier at work.

Now I can bake, or at least I used to do ok with baking. My track record over the last year has been spotty: made incredible batch of mini cupcakes for me and my family, try to make same cupcakes again for work event and accidentally put in 1/2 cup of baking soda instead of 1/2 teaspoon; great peanut butter cookies at home on a cold winter night, try to make same cookies to bring for Christmas and I accidentally put in 3 eggs and 1 cup of milk instead of 1 egg and 3 cups of milk. For every good thing I made, some cosmic intervention would make sure I followed it with something inedible. Self-diagnosed with recipe dyslexia, understandably, this put me off of cooking for awhile.

Because Irene made me cancel my original Saturday plans (thanks a lot, weather people, our area maybe needed a good umbrella, not sandbags) last night I decided to go forward with my plan to make the mini Fontina Cheese Pizzas, of course I had to ask the person at the deli counter what fontina cheese was and where I could find it. Here are the results, obviously the left is a fancy show off photograph from the cookbook.
Their mini pizzas look tasty and appetizing. My pizzas look like something you would ask the waiter to send back to the kitchen.

The problem? Not 100% certain, but most likely the fact that the recipe called for 3 egg yokes and I put in 3 whole eggs had something to do with it. Rather than tasting like a pizza, they tasted like cheesy scrambled eggs on top of dough, kinda like a quiche but without the pastry crust. The dough didn't come out right either, my oven runs a bit hot so the bottoms were burned while the top outer crust was barely bronzed and it tasted like a saltine to me for some reason. So my hurricane shut-in dinner was crackers with scrabbled eggs on top!

After last night's kitchen disaster, I was pleasantly surprised by my success at a different recipe this morning. Not in the same ballpark as baking, but it was so quick and easy and delicious -- my favorite combination. Link-hoping, I randomly came across a recipe on A Tale of Two Kitchens for Peach Almond Smoothie and since I coincidentally already had all of those ingredients at home, I gave it a try. Maybe since I'm trying to kick my coffee habit, I can start the day off with a smoothie instead. Of course, I'm not going to stop my 3pm candy fix.

2 comments:

  1. I’m surprised the food fail didn’t involve the dough. I tried to make a cornmeal pizza dough once and it came out so bad after so much work, I basically swore off ever making dough again.

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  2. Oops, did I give the impression that the crust was ok? Nope, sorry for misleading you - it was like eating a weird cracker, so it was a proper failure all around :)

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