Messing Up

When I'm cooking, I absolutely hate messing up. A trigger in my brain goes off that I failed, and that I will not be able to do it again. But I think it is significant for all cooks to fail a couple of times, or a lot. If the cook didn't mess up, then they couldn't find the different ways to make it taste better or the correct way to cook it, so the chef wouldn't mess it up again. I know my many weaknesses when it comes to cooking.

Recently, I attempted to make donuts. I poured oil into a pan, and than put it on a medium temperature to slowly heat it up. I made the donut dough with the usual baking ingredients, adding some extra vanilla and cinnamon in it. I always have a bite of the dough, because your baking and the dough is the absolute best part! So, the dough tasted really good, which made me very excited to eat these donuts. The next step was to fry them, and this is where it went wrong. The oil was at the right frying temperature. The way that I had tested it, was that I put the end of a wooden spoon into the oil and it began to bubble around the end. Then I put a single donut in at a time, and cooked it quickly until golden brown. I also used plastic tongs at first (horrible idea, just bends them). I took the doughs out of the oil, and waited a couple of minutes for them to cool off. I took the oil off the stove, because if the oil got a certain temperature to catch on fire. Never put water and burning oil together. Once five minutes have passed, I bit into the donut and it tasted gooey. That means it's really undercooked... :( 

Another one of my failures was that I put way too much garlic salt into my garlic butter sauce. It only needs a slight seasoning of garlic salt, and more on the butter side. It was much better when I did it the second time!

Now, I am also really bad at breading chicken. It's not the technique, it was the breading. The breading I used was under seasoned, and practically tasted like nothing. I was pretty disappointed. I also tried a second time and messed up again, with the fear of over seasoning and making it taste bad. Unfortunately, the chicken's breading was flavorless again. The chicken was delicious though! I'm pretty proud of juiciness of the chicken, and the perfect color of white. (The chicken should never be pink). The next time I am going to bread the chicken will be successful! The chicken had to be at a temperature of 160 to be done. Then I let it sit for ten minutes so the juices were compacted in the chicken, so when I took a bite of it, my mouth would water and my taste buds would be fulfilled. 

This is my breaded pork, where the breading was successfully done. I also made some four cheese pasta next to it. I still have the skin on chicken, because I like the meat like that. It's your choice to take it off. 

Next Recipes

1. I have a delicious pork recipe that I'm going to try soon. My mom's recipe is what I am basing it off, and it's like a Pork Wellington. The pork will be wrapped around Prosciutto and a puff pastry. There will be goat cheese to give it that extra flavor. I don't know what other mixtures would go together yet. I was actually thinking of maybe putting pesto instead of the cheese, because I think that would taste really good together. 
2. My next recipe would be a 5-7 layer mac and cheese. It may be seven or it may be five cheeses. I wasn't sure where I wanted to take it. I feel like the over combination of cheeses may be to strong. I was thinking about searing the ham and bacon with garlic, and then adding it into the mac and cheese. Also, maybe mixing in some breadcrumbs and some hot peppers. 
3. Red Velvet pancakes. I would add some sweet cream cheese sauce and some toasted cinnamon pecans, and that would be a breakfast to enjoy! Another batch of pancakes would be blueberry pancakes with some extra vanilla snuck in, and maybe the same sauce. 

Than of course my birthday is coming up, so I want to make something then too! It may be the mac and cheese recipes, since all of the cheeses make the price go up. I'm hoping to be able to eat the macaroni along with my delicious ice cream cake.