Tuesday, July 14, 2009

secret 14 - the good, the bad, the ugly

despite the perception i gave off in my last job--apparently i did a reasonable facsimile of high-powered career woman and we all know they don't do domestic--i can cook. in fact, i can cook very well. that's not really a secret. 

what isn't widely known is that sometimes what i cook doesn't turn out that well, tho' i have written about it before. tho' i chalk that previous occasion up to having to cook outside on an old stove because my kitchen was completely torn apart. oh, and extreme clumsiness on my part.

however, this failure was more recent...i refer to it as the ugly bread incident.


it's a kind of stuffed bread which i have made numerous times. it's jamie oliver-inspired. you make a basic bread recipe, then roll it into a long relatively thin line of dough and load it with all kinds of delicious things...bacon, eggs, herbs, cheese, pesto--whatever you have around and which sounds good to you. then you close it up and usually it becomes a ring.  on this occasion, i had a new kind of flour and the dough went to pieces on me instead of staying together. resulting in this very ugly rather 8-shaped bread.


we had guests coming (for the first time--way to impress them, j) and there was no time to make a new batch, so i just had to make the best of it, serving them a couple of G&Ts first and hoping they wouldn't notice. and when they noticed, we just made a joke of it. luckily, it still tasted heavenly, even if we could hardly stand to look at it.

so that's secret 14: sometimes the stuff i cook doesn't turn out so well.

13 comments:

spudballoo said...

Giggle. Pretty much nothing that I cook turns out the way it's supposed to. Which is why I don't cook, I leave all that to MrSpud!

Great, ugly photo.

I_am_Tulsa said...

I am not going to lie...that is some "ugly" bread...but for some reason it still looks rather tasty...

I love your secrets...I am almost tempted to give away a secret or two myself!

Anonymous said...

I have to agree that it looks ugly, But don't just judge the bread by it cover... i guess it still taste yummy, I suppose...

I wanna know how does it taste???

=alvond

Sammi said...

That's not so bad... A few days ago my mum asked me to switch the hob on. All the buttons are attached to different rings than the ones that light up, and I have yet to get used to which one is which. There was oil in a pan on the one I switched on instead of potatoes in water... I nearly set fire to the kitchen!!!

Delwyn said...

Hi Julie

all I can see is something very yummy....


Happy days

Anonymous said...

All the more reason for me to argue that I was never made to be a cook - Too many things can go wrong.

Liz Fulcher, The Fragrant Muse said...

It doesn't look so bad to me. It has a kind of a wholegrain, healthy, appearance. Hey if it smells good and tastes better, bring on another helping!

will said...

Aren't those two photos from the 50's horror flick, "The Yeast That Ate Cleveland"?

Unknown said...

too funny...and you know why they look so good in cookbooks and on tv? food stylists!

So relax.

tracy

Char said...

there are a lot of things I eat that I would never eat if I just judged them on their looks....in the end, it's always how it tastes.

Yelena R. said...

Sometimes the ugliest concoctions are the most delicious :)

Laura Doyle said...

Hey, there's plenty of nasty looking things that taste amazingly sumptuous. Gravy for instance. : )

And you know what I did last week? I made whole wheat sandwich bread with white flour. And I wondered why it came out white when I was done. Seriously...I'm not blond.

Eliane Zimmermann said...

could be a twin of my last bread, tried a gluten free version...