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.
