This Isn’t Easy

I don’t mean to complain or anything, but this isn’t easy, and sometimes, especially on Sundays I can feel like I’m up against the wall. I try to do a lot of the cooking for my posts on the weekends, and when things don’t go as planned I feel the pressure. This past one was a weekend where too many things went wrong leaving me with a three quarters written post that I can’t use, but I can post about the post I’m not posting, which sounds like a great idea at 3:30 Sunday afternoon. I have posted before about my kitchen fails, and who doesn’t like to witness a good screw up?

Honestly my plan might have been a bit ambitious; grilled cheese made with pimento cheese (that I made) on brioche bread (that I also made)but I had all weekend. As I said, almost everything went badly, so I’ll break it down error by error, and perhaps you can benefit from my mistakes, and if not, maybe just have a laugh at my expense. Go ahead, I can’t hear you, and frankly I’d probably be laughing along with you.

Making brioche is time consuming, and I used a hybrid of the quick method from Cooks Illustrated, and one using all-purpose flour and another from Use Real Butter. I knew I had some packets of yeast, but I didn’t check them before I got started, and failed to notice the best by date of sometime in 2010, and perhaps with a product like yeast dates might be a bit more important than with ketchup. I should have checked out one of my favorite sites Still Tasty, and performed the recommended test. As I was making the dough I could smell the nice yeasty smell so I figured I was good to go. And I was already in a half pound of butter, so I pushed on.

As I mentioned the dough took much longer than expected, so this was clearly going to be dinner rather than lunch (the original plan). Adding the butter one tablespoon at a time is a slow process as you need to wait for each one to be incorporated before adding the next. When I make this again I will try the method suggested in the Cook’s Illustrated, and get the butter much softer. The dough didn’t rise as expected on the first go round, but the second rise went better, as did the last one after it went into the pan. It smelled wonderful as it baked, and looked pretty when I took it out of the oven.

It probably didn’t help when the Pyrex pan slipped out of my hands as I inverted it to remove the bread and it and fell on the loaf. I let the poor broken thing cool, but when I tried slicing it I could see the center was still doughy, the bread was much too dense and the bread fell apart as I sliced. It did taste good, and I managed to get four slices that held together enough to use for the planned grilled cheese sandwiches.

The pimento cheese (the one bright spot in this endeavor) turned out quite well. I got my griddle hot, buttered the fragile bread, spread the pimento cheese, and managed two small sandwiches. They were beautifully browned, and I even managed to cut each one in half without them falling apart completely. It was late, and we were very hungry, but we both agreed that as good as the pimento cheese was on a cracker, it didn’t translate well to grilled cheese. It was too rich and salty. Nope. We had some Sunday for lunch with crackers, and agreed that is where it belongs. Perhaps it would be good on sliced white bread, but we don’t have that, we have crumbly, dense, doughy brioche.

Sunday morning as we were doing some cleaning up, actual as well as digital, my daughter asked me if she should empty our camera’s memory stick and I said yes, please do. Which it turns out was a perfect final note for this ill-fated post as all the pictures I needed for it were still on the stick, but hadn’t been uploaded yet. The photos you see here are the few I took with my phone. All and all a perfect storm of cooking/blogging disasters. Fortunately no one was harmed, and I will do something useful with our brioche brick; maybe shellac it and use it for a doorstop, or freeze it and make bread pudding, or croutons.

As I said this isn’t easy. On a great day I have beautiful photographs of fabulous and delicious food, and just a mountain of dishes and a filthy floor to deal with, on a bad day I have all of the above. I am determined to make a successful brioche, and a better grilled cheese, and to tell you about them without complaining about the mess I created in the effrot, but sometimes it helps to vent. What do you do when you have a day of kitchen disasters?