Recent misses among the hits

I've had a few misses among the hits in my kitchen this week.  I don't know which is true: when you cook a lot you're less likely to have misses because you're learning and gaining experience and expertise, OR when you cook a lot you're more likely to have misses simply because you're generating more food and you're likely to screw up at least a certain percentage of the time.  Who knows - I guess the more new recipes you try the more likely you are to have misses, especially when you're adapting or veganizing another recipe or just making it up when you go along.  In any case, here's what happened this week.

On Friday I made a really good plum crisp, similar to the apple crisp recipe in the original Moosewood Cookbook.  We got a bag of ripe plums on special for $1.00, and I needed to do something with them.  This recipe turned out really good - here's basically what I did:

1.  Peel plums (about 6 big ones), and slice into small wedges.  Sprinkle liberally with lemon juice and toss with hands.  Add a tablespoon or so of vanilla extract and toss again.  Sprinkle on 1/4 cup white sugar and toss gently.  Pour into greased 9x9 pan. 

2.  In a separate bowl, mix the following: 1 cup rolled oats * 1 cup white flour * 1/4 cup brown sugar * 1 tsp cinnamon * a dash each of nutmeg and allspice * 1/4 teaspoon salt * 1/2 cup melted butter * 1/2 cup finely-chopped walnuts.  Spread over the fruit mixture and pat into place.

3.  Bake uncovered at 375 for about 35 minutes.  Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes, then serve with vegan vanilla ice cream.

So a couple of days later I got a bag of really cute, good-smelling little apples, and decided to make the recipe again.  I chopped up the apples without removing the skins (mistake #1), then found that I had too many apples to fit in the 9x9 pan again, so used my 9x13 pan.  I used a glass pan this time, instead of a metal pan - possibly mistake #2.  Then I increased the quantities of all of the other ingredients to about 1-1/2 times what I had used for the plum crisp - mistake #3.  Then I decided to add about 1/4 cup sunflower seeds to the topping, then decided that since there was only about another 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts left in the bag I should add them too - somewhere in here was mistake #4.

So basically I now have a big pan of apple crisp with a very thick layer of topping, and the topping didn't get integrated with the apples since they were much drier than the juicy plums, so the whole thing kind of has the consistency of sawdust and the only way we can eat it is by putting it in a bowl and adding rice milk and eating it like it's cereal, plus the peel I left on the apples makes the texture kind of unpleasant.  Lessons learned! 

(Post-script: the boyfriend informed me just now that he had a big serving of the apple crisp sans rice milk last night and it was delicious - I guess I can't argue with that, but he does eat pretty much anything.  In any case, it wasn't up to my standards and I know what I'll do differently the next time.)

I also worked on version 1 of the lemon-rosemary cupcakes I'm trying to veganize, and they didn't turn out very good, but now that I've told the story of the failed apple crisp I don't want to write about another failure!  I need to get to work on version 2 of those cupcakes soon - hopefully today or tomorrow.

Happy eating, everyone!  I guess we don't get the successes without a few failures, right?