If your kitchen is anything like ours, it’s not all success all the time. We’d say 90% of the time, things turn out well. Some things we might love more than others due to personal preference, but the dishes themselves turn out the way the creator intended (we believe). We attribute the majority of that high percentage to a couple of factors:
1) We follow the directions.
We try to make at least 3 new recipes a week – recipes we’ve never, ever made before. We always follow the directions to the “T” the first time. No one knows how a dish is supposed to turn out like the creator of that recipe, so follow his or her directions. There have been many times when we have been asked for a recipe only to hear afterwards, “yeah, it didn’t really turn out.” Upon further inquiry, we discover that he or she didn’t even follow the recipe… they skimped here, substituted there and tried to cut corners. Well shoot, no wonder it didn’t turn out as intended. So, we highly recommend following the directions the first time, and then making adjustments as needed for next time. Be sure to make notes as to what you want to do differently next time, because you will forget.
2) We use trusted recipe sources.
As you may have learned by reading our about page , we almost exclusively use Food Network recipes, usually from Food Network Magazine. There is no reason for this other than we first started cooking because of Food Network and it quickly became where we turned for every recipe need because of it’s great track record of yielding awesome dishes for us. When the magazine was announced, we were ecstatic because we knew it would be a jackpot of reliable and (mostly) healthful recipes. Our tactic: when it arrives in the mail, we mark the ones we want to make asap. After we’ve made those, we file the magazine away with the others and return to them when we need more ideas. Things that may not have seemed super desirable at first glance stand out more and we make those. Pinterest is a great place to find inspiration, but it seems that many times they are a let-down. We read about a couple gals who test Pinterest recipes and report how good they are in real life. Finding their blog may save you some disappointment, because there is nothing more disheartening to a budding cook (or anyone, for that matter) than to put your precious money, time and effort into a meal that turns out to be a disaster, which usually ends ann overall discouragement to try new recipes in the future.
Speaking of recipes that turned out horribly, check out these recipe fails:
This Roasted Halibut with Saffron-Fennel Butter looks pretty good, right? It was a TOTAL recipe fail, not because it was gross or didn’t “turn out,” but because it was far too much money and effort… and no one really cared for it. The price tag on this dish was a whopping $45 and was sort of a fussy recipe. We realized that we don’t love the firm texture of halibut and Blake felt the saffron was a little overpowering. FAIL.
Shrimp Sumer Rolls are gorgeous, fresh, and hard to mess-up, right? WRONG. These took a ton of time and a ton of ingredients (/money) and were utterly bland. Oh, and the sauce was reminiscent of vomit. No joke. FAIL.
These Peanut Butter Cookie Bars seemed to have a no-fail ingredients list. They were super oily and salty (we followed the recipe exactly). FAIL. But the little ankle-biters sure enjoyed pressing their fat little fingers into that dough.
So, the moral of the story is that there are few people, if any, who manage to avoid a recipe fail once in a while. As Blake says, it is all “part of the process” and offer good experiences to learn a thing or two. But let’s have as few as possible when we have mouths to feed, shall we?
