Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Perseverance and Lessons Learned

Lessons I learned this weekend:

1. Pizza Sauce is not a good tool for mopping the kitchen floor

2. Just a little butter will ensure a clean release of pizza dough from the pan

3. Egg whites are a great way to glue your waxed paper to your baking sheet


Saturday evening, I decide to make a homemade pizza for dinner. This can be a time consuming process, but the results are worth it. I started by making some dough. Next after getting the dough into a pan, I topped with my yummy homemade pizza sauce. What happened next, is still unclear, but somehow as I turned away to call to my roommate to come into the kitchen to help with toppings, I bumped the pan, and it fell from the counter. And of course... it flipped on the way down, landing sauce side down. You can imagine the fun of cleaning up this saucy, doughy mess, all while trying to keep the monster at bay!

Fast forward a bit, I recently bought a new Kitchen Aid stand mixer, and decide I wanted to give making meringues a shot. So of course it would only make since that the perfect time to start such a finicky recipe would be after having already had a dinner fiasco... Unfortunately, I pulled the meringues a little too soon from the bowl, and they hadn't quite reached the right stage.

Meringues take about 2 hours to bake, so an hour later when I peeked in the oven, and looked at the sad little meringue blobs... they had completely melted flat onto the pan. So I turned the oven off, and decided to wait until morning, to deal with the cleanup. I got up Sunday morning to find that the meringues, in their melting process, had completely glued themselves and the waxed paper to the baking sheet.

I did however succeed in making a pizza the second night. And yesterday, I made my second attempt at meringues, these turned out MUCH better.

Trying to decide what my next kitchen disaster will be :)

3 comments:

Natalie said...

Don't you just love when things do not turn out as planned? I tried making home made mayo a couple of weeks ago and yeah it took me 4 tries. I was about to give up and just go buy some and I finally got it right.

Heather said...

Oh no! It's so infuriating to put so much effort into something only to have it fall...well, flat. ;)

At least your meringue looked fine for a while. I tried making a souffle one time and just about burned out the motor on my mixer before I realized that a tiny bit of egg yolk had gotten into the egg whites, so they would not peak no matter what. Argh!

Organic Meatbag said...

I use egg whites in my hair for extra "hold" and "sheen"...and "protein"!