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Monday, September 13, 2010

Recipe Flop

One of the biggest ways that our family saves money is by making our own meals instead of buying ready to eat meals or going out to eat. I post a lot of recipes that we use and enjoy on a regular basis, and usually they turn out great and look appealing. But it doesn't always happen this way.

If you make the majority of your own meals, you've probably seen a recipe that looked great and then tasted "blah" or just didn't look like the picture. I found a recipe for Goat Cheese Empanadas in my August issue of Real Simple. It looked really easy, and I thought I could modify it slightly for my family.

Instead of using goat cheese, I filled half of the empanadas with mozzarella cheese and pizza sauce, and the other half with Velveeta cheese, black beans, and salsa. My problems first started because I overfilled the crust, which made them really hard to seal. Since they did not seal very well, the empanadas came out of the oven looking like this:


and this:


Really, from these pictures they don't look too terrible, but I thought they looked horrible when I pulled them out, and of course were nothing like the picture in the magazine! We went ahead and ate them anyway, and they actually tasted really good. Now, if I make these again I have a better idea about how much (or really, how little) I can put in each empanada to make them come out a little prettier. And really, how they look doesn't matter as much as how they taste!

So the next time you end up with a recipe flop, I hope you'll see it as a learning experience instead of a failure! I know I needed this reminder that what I cook doesn't have to be perfect to be right for my family!

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