Recipe for Success
As part of the Blog a Day for the Month of May challenge, I’m doing a blog swap with fellow writer, Elizabeth Kricfalusi. She and I have a lot in common besides making a living with words. She loves to travel, has a soft spot for small furry animals, enjoys food and endures unique misspellings of her name.
Today, my post appears on Elizabeth’s blog, Embrace Adventure, and hers appears below on mine. Drop by her blog to read my post, but take time to follow a few of her amazing adventures. She recently visited Antarctica, rescued a litter of squirrels and attended the Emmy Awards.
Oh yes, and she cooks. Bon Appetit!
Recipe for Success
By Elizabeth Kricfalusi
A good friend of mine has a business making and selling a variety of sweet fruit jams and tangy pepper jellies. I’ve been working with her on some ideas for marketing them, including designing her Web site: Utter’s Delights Gourmet Preserves.
One idea we’ve been throwing around is creating a small cookbook of recipes using her products she could sell along with them. I wanted to do this with her because I’ve recently become interested in recipe development. I thought it would be a great way to combine two of my better skills—cooking and writing. Not to mention that it would be a great adventure…
Today I took my first stab at creating a new recipe, featuring her Tart Cherry Jam. Even with all my experience baking for my own purposes, it turned out to be harder than I thought. I’m not going to write about the entire experience here (I’ll do that in a future post on my own blog), but I thought I’d share 5 lessons I learned along the way.
Lesson 1: Always make sure you have the ingredients you need (aka thank God for Safeway!)
The stupid thing here is that I’ve known this for a very long time and yet somehow I managed to start working only to discover I didn’t have any eggs in the house. (In my defence, I usually have eggs on hand. But just before I went on vacation, I was having trouble with my refrigerator’s temperature controls and had to dump some perishables, and then forgot to replace them after I got home.) The upside was that I was able to pick up a few other things I needed while I was at the grocery store, saving me a trip later this week.
Lesson 2: Allow melted butter to cool BEFORE adding it in to your batter.
Otherwise the aforementioned eggs will begin to cook in the bowl, resulting in some decidedly unappealing lumps. Thank God for strainers!
Lesson 3: When you’re making a recipe that calls for brushing the hot pan with butter, remove the battery from the smoke detector in the kitchen.
Nothing like a shrill, high-pitched wail to up the stress factor when you’re already trying to do everything “just right.”
Lesson 4: On the other hand, make sure the batteries in your digital camera are fresh if you’re planning on recording the process.
You’ve got enough to juggle without having to remember where you keep the batteries, retrieve them, and replace them without letting anything burn on the stove.
Lesson 5: If you’re having problems with your refrigerator and freezer, maybe wait until they’re fixed before trying to make a recipe that calls for ice cream.
I was trying to cut even slices out of the brick, but had to settle for shapeless blobs. Not a big problem, since they were being wrapped up, but it still put some extra time pressure on me, which I really didn’t need.
But, despite the inevitable glitches, I was pretty happy with the final result.
Oh… what did I make? Well, here’s a picture. I call them Black Forest Ice Cream Crepes.
I’ll definitely want to make some slight changes the next time I make it, but overall—not a bad first effort!