Iterating

Instead of the usual cooking routine, I took time recently on refining and iterating on recipes. I've done this before, most notably when experimenting with shortbread, but never with dinner. It is odd, as well; there is no dinner I can cook that is distinctly "my" dinner. Maybe black bean cakes as I've cooked them a few times, though never really learned much from them. Or tofu and rice; but I season that what appears to be a unique way each time. The trout of last weekend, however, seems a good candidate.

E and I cooked it again, somewhat randomly, with a few attempted tweaks. I think I overcooked it, however, as it was not noteworthy as the last effort, though still a fine meal. The modifications this time were a bit more oil in the pan, a bit more flour on the skin, and (potentially?) a hotter pan. Also, I may have cooked it too much in the pan, making the three minutes it spent in the oven one or two too many. We had it with E's prep of oven-roasted veggies and also her take on a simple dish of farro, onion, and goat cheese that I cooked earlier in the week.

Though I complain of having no signature dinner dish, the same can not be said of breakfast. My pancake recipe is a frequent request from my tummy and others. A prep right before camping this weekend, and a discussion over camp breakfast the next day, had me decide to make the dry mix in bulk. I added a dash of both ginger and cayenne pepper to the recipe, and settled on 100% spelt flour for the "perfect" taste. I need to take a few times to weigh out bulk quantities of the recipe and get it to a happy place; the current prep is all volumes, pinches, and dashes. But, once done with that, I'll post the current state of easy-to-measure recipe and bulk-by-weight for all to enjoy.