Saturday, January 12, 2008

Cooking Blunder

Ok, I know that this 1 post per month average is not going to work. These blogs take commitment if you want readership, which I don't even know if I have.

Anyway, while in Uganda, my favorite food was called chapatti (various spellings). It is a flat bread that is light and fluffy. You an eat it with sugar, or by wrapping it around a banana, or just wiping up the juices from your meal. There are many recipes for it on the web, all using wheat flour or all purpose flour. However, for some reason I can't get past this memory that our host mother said that she used maize flower, which explains the yellow color that it had. Wheat flower makes it look like Nan (also various spellings) which is an Indian flat bread.

Long story short, I decided to use corn flour this time because I thought that would be like maize flower (Nick is the resident maize expert so maybe he can say if that is the same thing). In my previous attempt I used regular flour and they were pretty good, but not yellow, and fairly dense. Corn flour did not work out by any stretch of the imagination. It was still gritty even though it looked quite fine. It would not press into a flat pancake shape very well without falling apart. I cooked it anyway and it turned out quite awful. It tasted like a bitter cornbread pancake with probably an aftertaste of vegetable oil. We tried eating it with applesauce, sugar/cinnamon mix, and chocolate syrup. Eventually we were just trying to completely mask the taste instead of compliment it. Beth tried hard to make me feel better, but I only felt worse when hers was covered in 1/4 inch of powdered sugar and chocolate syrup lined all over it.

To top things off I burned the vegetable oil onto our calphalon frying pan and I am currently searching for a method to remove it.

In other news, apparently I have to post more often to be worthy of Nick's link list.

1 comment:

Nick Haywood said...

No no, all you have to do is just have you're name start with a "B".