Monthly Archives: July 2011

Am I the only one who gets absurdly disappointed when a recipe doesn’t come out as well as I thought it would? Because it’s happened twice recently.

First, there was the great pickled chard disappointment. I recently wrote about trying a recipe for quick pickled swiss chard stems. I thought it sounded delicious: spicy, sour… yummy, right? And the pickles looked pretty, too:

I followed the recipe without noticing the lack of any salt. What was I thinking? Where was my brain? I let the jar sit in the fridge for a few days and then excitedly opened them at lunch.

Sour? Yes.

Spicy? Yes.

Otherwise flavorless? Yes. Unfortunately, they really didn’t taste like much other than vinegar and crushed red pepper. Not awful, but not worth eating to be honest. I think this has the potential to be a good recipe, but it definitely needs the addition of salt. (That also explains the cloudy brine )

Next up: the ho-hum breakfast cake. I was browsing Pinterest yesterday and saw a recipe for lemon-blueberry-yogurt cake. I had a few ingredients in the fridge that I needed to use up, coincidentally: lemons, blueberries, and some vanilla Greek yogurt. I thought for sure this was a sign that I just had to try the quick bread. I altered the recipe first by substituting coconut oil for canola oil, and I cut the sugar down to 3/4 cup instead of the full cup the original recipe called for. I couldn’t wait to wake up so I could eat it for breakfast!

Sorry for the crummy photos, but my camera was in the basement so I just used Instagram, and there was not a lot of light in my kitchen at 6:30 a.m.:

I should mention that I also reduced the amount of powdered sugar in the glaze from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup and still had more than enough. No one in my family could agree on this cake. While I think I could cut the sugar down even further to 1/2 a cup, I liked the bread. Drew didn’t. At all. He hated the texture (it is very dense), and thought it was way too sweet (eek – imagine if I made the recipe exactly as written). Noah thought “it tasted weird.” Jake thought it was “pretty good.” But Jake isn’t too picky, either. Laura wouldn’t eat it, but she doesn’t like blueberries, so I didn’t expect her to. (Instead, she ate her scrambled egg and the proceeded to devour half of my portion.)

Drew flat out said I shouldn’t bother making this again. So I cut up the rest of the bread, packaged it, and froze it. I’ll enjoy it as a treat when I am craving something sweet. Have you made anything recently that didn’t come out well?