Which is actually why this blog exists. The most continually painful example of this is cooking. We make pretty awesome stuff, we don't write it down, and we can't figure out how to make it again. This is a sad, sad cycle in our culinary adventures.
When I was visiting up at MIT last year we made these hand pies. They were fabulous. We used leftover chicken korma we'd made the night before for savory ones. We also made two fruit versions that were kind of dessert-like but without being much more than naturally sweet-- apple with walnut chunks and raspberry with almond slices. Although we make it slightly differently every time we do more or less have the korma recipe, and we might be able to recreate those. But the fruit ones were completely on the fly with whatever was at hand, so we didn't write anything down. A lot of people dropped into the kitchen to see what smelled so good (which is per norm for us cooking somewhere), but I doubt any of them wrote it down either.
The worst case? An instance of perfection in the form of fried zuchini. Most people don't know that I love fried zuchini... probably more than is healthy. This was another visit to MIT, and goodness only knows what we put into the breading. Oh sure I know the technique for how we layered it before frying, that the white pepper was just right, and that there was, of course, salt involved (Banik in a kitchen for goodness sake, of course there's salt). But I have no idea about everything else. This zuchini was so perfect that if you had merely suggested the idea of dipping it into marinera sauce I would have stabbed you with my fork. But alas, all successive efforts have failed to equal that batch.
We really ought to write things down once in a while. Oh, and maybe measure stuff so we have something to write (as it turns out "some" is not a reproducable quantity). It's going to be very sad to spend the rest of my life trying to find good zuchini again, but I suppose everyone needs a goal in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment