Recipe Failures
Hi–it’s been a while. Sorry for that.
The above is a banana blossom. Either you’re totally familiar with these or you’ve never seen one in your life. Until recently, I fell into the latter camp.
Banana blossoms are beautiful, so of course I wanted to try cooking with one. To that end, I found a recipe for banana blossom salad.
The results were disastrous.
Said recipe came from a restaurant cookbook. I’ve never heard of this restaurant, but it’s popular with celebrities, many of whom enthusiastically blurbed the book.
Then again, non-cooking celebrities may not be reliable blurbers.
It must be said this chef offers some excellent cooking advice. How too many people are fetishizing authenticity instead of just cooking. That any wok will do.
So, this banana blossom salad. It requires ingredients from two other recipes before you get to the damned salad itself. I suppose you could skip them, but banana blossom alone is rather bland. The dish would suffer without these sub-recipes, and commercial substitutions aren’t offered.
Fair enough, but a warning in the headnote would be appreciated. Further, those two sub-recipes give substantial yields. And the salad needs only two tablespoons of each ingredient.
You’re asking whether I read the recipe through before starting.
Yes. Repeatedly. This didn’t stop me from getting far into the cooking before realizing I was in over my head. And this was my fault. Not the chef’s.
Back to our failed recipe.
Both sub-recipes, fried peanuts and chile jam, call for deep frying. Both recipes.
Imagine the mess this makes.
By now it’s nearly 4pm, the kitchen is splattered with sunflower oil. Trump has declared his bromance with Putin. Or hasn’t he? He can’t decide. He’s walking back and forth so much, he’s doing the Hustle.
It is then that I tip a half-cup of fish sauce on the cookbook. Which is from the library.
Daubing at the ruined book, I finish the fried peanuts and the chili sauce and manage to slice the slimy banana blossom. I stir together the remaining ingredients and taste.
This salad isn’t just salty. This salad is the Bonneville Salt Flats in a Pyrex bowl. The room is flooding with negative ions. I am retaining water simply looking at it.
Who’s to blame? The chef? The publisher? No recipe testers are thanked in the credits. Were there any? Did the publisher expect anyone to cook from this book? Or were we expected to gaze longingly at the pictures?
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Why share a failure? Because all too often, social media food is perfect: beautifully plated, set on a lovely table (you know, the one found in an Italian nunnery) before an eager group of family or friends who proffer their admiration before devouring every last bite.
Real life is the fish sauce sticky book, the fussy children, the carbophobic guests. Real life is mismatched dishes that are chipped rather than charming.
Real life is error-ridden cookbooks.
From Interstate 80. I was not driving.
