I can say with great confidence that I don’t always hit it out of the park with my cooking. Often times, I need to make several attempts before getting it right. Thankfully, I know a couple of brave souls who are willing to eat what I make even when my cooking doesn’t turn out the way I expected! Here’s several recent misadventures in my kitchen, i.e. cooking experiments.
Eggplant Feta Dip
I enjoy eating eggplant dips a lot, and I found these recipes on Eating Well and iFoodreal that looked quite delicious to me. When I tried adapting these recipes, however, things started to fall by the wayside. Problem #1: I cooked with an eggplant that was way too large, and the roasting time took longer than necessary. Problem #2: I decided not to seed the jalapeno pepper that I added into my dip. BAD IDEA. The heat from the pepper was way too overpowering, and I tried to mellow it out by adding cumin. Although the cumin helped a little, the flavor just wasn’t right.
Coconut Ginger Crisps
I made these coconut ginger cookies by using a recipe that I found on Nutrition Stripped. These cookies were amazing right out of the oven because they were not too sweet. The next day, however, the cookies just didn’t taste as good to me. They were quite mushy and reminded me of overnight banana oatmeal cookies. I’m going to try making these again some time soon and flatten out the cookies a bit more so that they turn out a bit crispier. I also plan to add a couple more ingredients in there just for fun.
Green Tea Muffins
I’ve always wanted to make desserts with green tea matcha powder, so I decided to go for it this weekend. WARNING: matcha powder can be quite expensive. I paid $9 for a relatively small package of matcha powder at a Japanese supermarket. Fortunately, most recipes that I have found online only call for about 2 teaspoons to 1 tablespoon of matcha powder, so the package should last me for a while.
I made these muffins over the weekend, and the consensus was that they tasted way too bland. Fortunately, I still had a lot of my skinny mint chocolate ganache that I made before. My friends and I slathered the ganache on top of the muffins, and we nearly finished the entire batch in one go!
Things I learned from this experience: 1) tweak the muffin recipe and 2) that mint chocolate ganache is absolutely delicious. Make it using this recipe, and you’ll be glad that you did!
Spinach & Kale Dip
I’ve been wanting to develop a kale and spinach dip for a while after I tried out Trader Joe’s Spinach and Kale Greek Yogurt Dip.
My recipe still isn’t quire where I want it to be yet. (By the way, it’s that small patch of green that you see on top of the couscous.) Hopefully I’ll come up with something in the next few weeks!
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