Today's lesson: Listen to your friends. Especially Rose-Anne, when she makes concerned faces while looking at a recipe.
What happened was this: A month or so ago, I went to a work potluck. One of the girls I work with, L2, is a notoriously innovative cook, with somewhat mixed but occasionally stunning results. (I hear that we don't even see half of what she makes, which I would almost believe.) For this potluck, she brought coconut crepes and a sweet tomato sauce. And boy, were they ever delicious! I was slightly smitten. So I bugged her for a few days to at least roughly tell me what she had done, and eventually she did and it sounded okay so I pulled a crepe recipe off the internet and without trying it printed it up for my cookbook.
Warning bells should be going off now. I a) took a recipe from a knowingly haphazard cook, b) modified it using an internet recipe, c) never made it myself, and d) put it in a goddamn cookbook. I'm smart sometimes like that. When I showed Rose-Anne my master copy on Saturday she made a dubious face as I explained what had happened, as I tried to explain how good and different and awesome this recipe was, or could be.
Today, after shipping out ten cookbooks, I came home and finally finally had time to make the recipe. It wasn't that bad, I suppose... I had to tweak the recipe (adding a cornstarch slurry to the sauce to thicken it and adding more coconut milk to the batter to thin it out) and it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but it also wasn't a total failure. However, it needs work. I'm going to give it a few more shots, modify the recipe so that it actually is what it could be, and send out revision sheets to everybody who already got a cookbook. So be warned: if you make the coconut crepes with sweet tomato sauce, it probably isn't going to be the best ever. Give me a few weeks, and I'll repent my sins and have you all over for brunch.
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1 comment:
Oh, my dear, this made me chuckle! One of my lab colleagues practically boycotts recipes, even though he cooks all the time, and it pains me that he doesn't use recipes or write down what he does. The food he shares with me is AMAZING. Like, if he wasn't already married, I'd want to marry him myself.
I am, of course, much more conservative about writing recipes and sharing my results with others. I happen to like being able to look back at my old cooking notes when I step into the kitchen to cook a new meal. I just don't have the brain power to make everything up from scratch when it's seven o'clock at night, I've worked all day, and I'm hungry. I just want to have a good time while I cook dinner and know that the results are going to be delicious. Is that too much to ask?
Best of luck with the crepe recipe! You'll figure it out :-)
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