Monday, June 14, 2010

My idiocy leads to a better recipe

It’s a good thing I didn’t have to do one of those home ec projects in high school where you carried an egg around for a week pretending it was a baby, because my poor egg-child would have been dead in five minutes.
   The proof of this was in a recent baking session. I discovered the recipe I was working on called for room-temperature eggs, and the eggs were still in the fridge. Wanting to speed the process along, I put one egg in each of the two pockets of my jeans.
   Not smart – one brush against a chair at the table and one of the eggs cracked, sending its icy cold insides into the pocket. Yuck.
   As you can see, I’m perfectly capable of cooking idiocy.
   But sometimes idiocy can lead to lovely things.
   In fact, it actually improved a recipe I found in the pages of Martha Stewart Living called Herb Pita Crisps (click here for the recipe on the Martha Stewart website), a remarkably easy and incredibly delicious snack or appetizer. (It’s what I chose to serve as the appetizer at my parents’ retirement party for about 30 people last summer.)
   The recipe calls for pita breads to be split, spread with butter, sprinkled with fresh chives and salt and pepper, cut into quarters and baked in the oven for about 15 minutes.
   The first couple of times I made it, I used white pita bread. The results were great and I kept making the recipe.
   But once when I was at the grocery store, I accidentally grabbed whole wheat pita breads instead of white.
   I lamented my stupidity upon my arrival at home, but decided to give the whole wheat pitas a whirl.
   To my delight, the chips tasted better and were more crispy. And they took less time in the oven to bake to this delicious state – seven minutes.
   This is how I advise you make the recipe if you try it -- whole wheat pitas with seven minutes in the oven.
   There’s another change I make to this recipe. Instead of using 3.5-inch round pita breads as called for in the recipe, as these are hard to find, I use six-inch round ones and cut them into wedges.
   And serve these chips right out of the oven. There will be some eager eaters waiting.
   Maybe my idiocy will lead to more happy cooking accidents.

No comments: