Friday, March 4, 2011

Ninth Inning, Two Outs, Full Count And A Recap

Let's just say if my cooking this week was baseball, I would be down in the ninth inning with two outs and a full count. Yes, two out of three of this week's recipes did not turn out well at all. I was actually very disappointed tonight when we tasted one of the recipes and tried to eat the other for dinner and both were complete bombs.

The first recipe, Slurpy Pan-Asian Noodles, had all the bare bones to be a great dish but was unfortunately over-sauced; not because I over-sauced, because the recipe called for too much sauce. The worst part of the whole experience is that the recipe required tons of preparation in the form of julienned vegetables. First of all, is it bad that I had to look up what julienne means? :) Once I found out, I knew I was in trouble because I have limited knife skills and my knives need to be sharpened......badly. It took me a long time to cut the vegetables into match-stick thin pieces and they looked lovely when I was done. I also made authentic Udon noodles and boiled them to perfection. If it wasn't for that damn sauce, the dish would have been really good. Brad and I both thought that if there had been half as much sauce, the dish would have been perfect.

For the second recipe, I chose potato salad. I thought I found a nice version on Cooks.com but I was clearly mistaken. When I first read the recipe, I thought that it was strange to use both sour cream and mayonnaise in potato salad but I decided that it was worth a try. Guess what? It wasn't worth a try. This recipe was unfortunately a dud. I ended up doctoring it up my own way by adding sweet and dill pickles, yellow mustard and extra celery. Brad says the end result is pretty good but I think he is just really hungry and would like anything since I haven't cooked all week due to having the flu.

Better luck next week, right? I am doing my recap right here because two of the three recipes didn't work out.

Basic Risotto and Risotto Stock
"The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook" by Kim O'Donnel
Pages 30 and 33

Dilled Spring Potato Salad
Cooks.com

Slurpy Pan-Asian Noodles
"The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook" by Kim O'Donnel
Pages 175-176

2 comments:

  1. Dear Kiersten, I'm really sorry to hear of your experience with my Pan Asian Slurpy Noodles. The recipe was tested several times before going to outside testers. Curious: Do you remember how many ounces of udon noodles you boiled the other night? If it was less than 16 ounces (the recipe calls for 16-18 ounces) then I can understand that the noodles would have been over sauced as you described. Feel free to reach out with any further questions or comments. All best, Kim O'Donnel kim@kimodonnel.com

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  2. What a lovely gesture from Kim! I truly appreciate her taking the time to write to me and I wrote her a detailed response. I am enjoying her cookbook and I plan on preparing many more dishes from her book throughout the remainder of the year. Stay tuned.

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