Monthly Archives: February 2013

I bake home-made, from-scratch, June-Cleaver bread from time to time, using a recipe from Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day, and every now and then, I like to mix it up a little.  You know, experiment.  I make strombolis, calzones, and the like, but sometimes I just add ingredients for fun.  Chunky ingredients.  With color. And texture. And flavor.

And most of the time it works.

Most recently I decided to add chopped red, orange, and yellow peppers, garlic herb cream cheese, and grated cheddar.  It baked beautifully:

And Varmint, who’d gotten off the bus in time to smell the fabulous hot, yeasty, just-baked air wafting through the house, sang praises to her Mama.  All was right with the world.

We cut into it.  Bits of beautiful red, yellow, and orange peppers surrounded by sprinklings of green herbs, peeked out of the slices.  Oh I was sure I’d made my masterpiece.  Judging by the crust this was going to be my culinary 50 Shades of Grey.  We were both drooling in anticipation.

Still warm, we slathered salted butter on the thick, steaming slices, let it melt a minute, and eagerly took large bites.

It was awful.  Horrendous.  The salt in the herbed cream cheese, mixed with the salt in the cheddar, the salt in the butter, and the salt already in the dough itself made it the most unpalatable bread I have ever eaten.

My beloved Varmint looked at me with a disappointment that cut right through my gut.  I can take the hit pretty much anywhere else in life, but to earn the scorn of my child…especially in my favorite field of food…it’s a blow, I tell you.

So I’m chained to the kitchen until I fix what I’ve done.  I vow to come back from this!  I will not be defeated!

It is said Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times when trying to develop the light bulb.   The way I see it, I have 9,999 more attempts to go.

I’m going to need more flour.

I hate beer.  It’s true.

But My Captain LOVES it, in a manly, macho, but not rising to the level of needing an intervention sort of way.  Actually, he’s a little on the snobby side of it.  He likes the dark, tasty, rich beers….the ones that have floating bits and chunks of unknown substances on the bottom of the bottle.

He thinks of that as solid flavor, man.

I think of it as the precursor to retching.

I do, however, enjoy interesting fru-fru drinks, probably because I love food and tastes and textures.  If they could make a drink called Macaroni and Cheese Martini with some kind of mixture of flavored vodkas, I’d try it.  You’d be amazed at the flavors some bartenders can come up with.

Tonight while sharing a drink with a friend at Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant in the Kentlands,

I tried a drink that included sliced Jalapenos, crushed Habaneros, muddled Pineapple, pineapple flavored vodka, nutmeg, and not NEARLY enough ice.

Want to know what it tasted like?

It tasted like I was drinking the Sweet and Sour Sauce from a chicken dish served at the chinese restaurant next door.  I kid you not.

It was….interesting.    I didn’t NOT like it, but I’m not sure I liked it, either.

Sipping this drink, the name of which I cannot recall, I found myself wondering ‘What the hell was this bartender thinking?’

And more importantly, ‘How on God’s Green Earth did the Manager think this was menu worthy?’

I think a Macaroni and Cheese Martini would have tasted LOADS better, and not had nearly as much tongue burn.

I hate tongue burn when I’m having a cocktail.

My Captain smirks and assures me that Beer never gives tongue burn.

I’ll take his word on it.