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I did a lot of food/drink experiments this weekend! But, as any born-again cooking enthusiast knows, for every single-teardrop-inducing bit of home-baked perfection (see previous entry), there are a bunch of burnt, flobby, cringe-tasting sadboys. Hey, you can’t win em all.

RIP to these duds:

- an attempted campari + clementine spritz, made with soda water instead of sparkling wine. Here, I learned that my sodastream is out of gas, producing a flat, tonic water-like taste, so the end result left something to be desired. 

- a “master cleanse” whey drink, made in an effort to start creatively using the whey from my weekly yogurt-making in a fun way and not pour it straight down the drain (which is illegal, it turns out!).

- I cooked my ahi tuna steaks for wayy too long. Well-done ahi tuna is not ideal. But! They were still delicious.

- My Sunday biscotti bake, which I was so looking forward to. I made the “Cosmicotti” recipe from Internet Cookies’ zine (left out the algae, had none around the house) and I even quick-pickled my own blueberries for it! But, as it turns out… I don’t like biscotti? It is, in fact, the opposite of what I want in a baked good. I probably made it too thick, so it didn’t cook long enough in the initial bake and didn’t brown up enough in the second bake. Anyway, it ended up being really pale and kind of chewy, which biscotti is not supposed to be. So it annoyed me so much that HOURS later I popped them back in the oven for 20 more minutes and now they’ve browned way up. But I’m still not happy with them. The pickled blueberries are their one redeeming factor!

Anyway, my takeaway is that it’s ok to be annoyed that a food/drink experiment didn’t work out. It was time and money and ingredients spent that you wish went toward something you ended up loving. But! It’s also massively educational to go through a few cooking fails. Now I know what goes together and what doesn’t, and what I like and don’t like. 

As far as wins this weekend, I also made my third batch of Greek yogurt (nailed it), some crispy sushi rice and tangy veggies to go with my (not half bad!) ahi tuna steaks, yummy eggs on pita with hummus sprinkled with togarashi, and I even made a really transcendent cup of pour-over coffee, which I’ve never done!

The oven is off, and the world continues spinning.