Do you think the pride I take in my cooking and baking is misplaced? I'm beginning to wonder. I love to experiment, love to try new recipes. Here's a lesson (well three lessons) on how to mess up a recipe, which I seem to be excelling at lately. What's up with that? Am I simply distracted? Getting old? Too much wine? Or maybe it's the heat and humidity getting to my brain.
Lesson #1: So tonight I made Piedmont Pie. It's a recipe from the Piedmont region of Italy and it's a custardy-y quiche-like vegetable pie...sounded great, very rustic. It calls for 1-1/3 cups ricotta and 1 cup mascarpone.
So of course, that's what I put in. And it's smelling delicious as it's baking in the oven and I'm unloading the dishwasher. But wait...what do I find in the dishwasher? The 1 cup measure. Seems I used the largest one in the drawer which turned out to be 1/2 cup. Fuck.
Lesson learned: Always unload the dishwasher before you begin cooking.
Lesson #2: Made a peach-blueberry cake for my book club last week. You know how you mix the wet ingredients separately from the dry ingredients? Well, the recipe said to mix the flour, baking soda and salt and then to cream the butter. So I did the dry stuff, then put the butter in the bowl and couldn't figure out why the flour mixture wasn't working with the butter. Duh...the butter was supposed to be in a separate bowl so you could cream it with the sugar, and THEN add it to the dry ingredients.
Well, I kept going cuz what else am I going to do, and with all those fresh peaches and blueberries how could it be bad?
The book club said it was good - they ate it, so I guess that's the test. But I took some homemade cookies too, just in case (they ate those, too!).
Lesson learned: Read the damn recipe.
Okay, I'll tell the third story another time. This is enough embarrassment for one night. I'm off to watch The Next Food Network Star - something I'll never be.
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