Food Envy

Look what I just got in the mail:

Shirley O. Corriher's  BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking. Corriher is a chemist turned chef, and her books give you the recipes for awesome food and the reasons why awesome food happens. I love Good Eats for the same reason: when I read BakeWise, I don't just get more recipes, I get a little bit closer to knowing how food works and being able to modify recipes on my own. And, as you know, chemistry is cool.

I'm sixty pages in (yes, I'm actually reading a cookbook through!), and I want to stop and make something every time a turn the page. I want to try these recipes out and make them mine. I want to put my new knowledge about baking powder and bundt pans to the test!

In other news, I desperately want to know how to make Indian food. Charlie and I went to India Palace last night, which is my favorite restaurant ever in terms of pure deliciousness. I could eat their food every night for a month and never get tired of it. (Of course, I'll never know that for a fact because it's way too expensive to eat there every night for a month!)

Indian food seems so simple: as far as I can tell, it's only tomatoes and onions cooked down into a paste and flavored with a blend of spices (most of which can be found in American spice racks). So, really, it's not so different from Italian tomato sauces except for its consistency, its spices, and its pairing with rice instead instead of pasta.

But, for the most part, I'm baffled as to how it's made! I've never found a recipe that actually turns out to be anywhere near as amazing as the stuff you can get at a good Indian restaurant. I don't know if it's the spices or my technique. It's a mystery to me, that cooking of banal ingredients into something that makes me groan with gluttonous delight.

So, I have food envy: I want to know how to calculate fantastic cake recipes, and I want to know how to make mind-bendingly good chana masala. Just a few more items to add to my long list of life goals!

Don't Try This At Home: Key Lime Sugar Cookies

No, really, don't try these at home. They aren't good.

 

Baked and frosted Key Lime Sugar Cookies

I know! They totally look like they should taste good, right? But they just don't. 

The recipe comes from Nancy Baggett's The All-American Dessert Book. It's only the second recipe I've made from the book--the first produced some decent-but-nothing-special fudgy brownies--but these were downright disappointing. 

  

Baggett's The All-American Dessert Book

The Key Lime Sugar Cookies had two flaws: 1) bitterness, and 2) bad texture. The bitterness could have come from several sources. The recipe calls for lemon extract (which smelled foul to me), lime zest steeped in vegetable oil, and reduced lime juice (which also smelled repugnant as I heated it on the stove). One (or perhaps all) of these ingredients made my cookies taste bitter instead of sweet or fragrant like I had expected. It's possible that I bought a bad lime or that reducing the lime juice burned it somehow (though the recipe implied that this was not possible).

Lime zest in oil and reduced lime juice.

The texture of the baked cookies was strange and unappealing. They were hard and sort of gummy, not crispy or soft and powdery (which is what their appearance led me to expect). Which isn't to say they were inedible: the texture seemed correct (neither over- nor undercooked), but just unappealingly dense.

The recipe also made very little dough and surprisingly few cookies.

 

Two little fist-shaped dough balls.

 However, rolling out and chilling the dough in sheets was a fun departure from my usual cookie baking process.

Rolled out dough, ready for the fridge.

 

The little "pills" that soon became lime wedges.

 Lime wedges ready for the oven.

I wasn't even in love with the frosting. With nothing but powdered sugar and lime juice in the mix, it was one-note and sweet without having any depth. And I wasn't very good at frosting my cookies all pretty-like. So they just got wiggles. So there!

 

Wiggly little wedges.

  

Anyway, despite their slightly wonky appearance, I deny any wrongdoing in the botching of this recipe! Why? Well, if only the texture or only the flavor was bad, I could blame it on incompetence. It's possible that I got some proportions wrong, or I burnt the lime juice or bought a bad lime, but I'm a good enough baker that I don't think I would make two major mistakes big enough to ruin a whole recipe!

So now what do I do with The All-American Dessert Book? Will I let two recipes ruin it for me, or will I give it another chance? Only time--and probably this blog!--will tell!