kitchenmage

Laugh and Learn, Learn and Laugh...and My New Thing

First up: Laugh as you learn how to open a milk carton. Seriously. A high-ranking official of the Austrian Milk Board is called upon to demonstrate how to open the sort of milk carton Americans give our small children. (The style is new there.) Hilarity ensues.

Learning with a few laughs along the way is the intent of my newest feature, launching this week.

The Food Blog User's Guide (FoodBUG) is a new series in which I will use my expertise at explaining strange and arcane technologies to Fortune 50 companies to take a good hard look under the apron of food blogs. People have many questions about how this "new media" works and FoodBUG will help to answer them.

Most of the information will apply to blogs and other non-corporate (i.e., relatively independent and unregulated) web sites in general, so if you read web media, it might be worth a follow.

Feed for Food Blog User's Guide posts

Follow theFoodBUG on twitter.

(There is a slight technical delay due to fresh cat gouge in my hand. First post should be up shortly just as soon as things around me stop coming unglued.)

FoodBUG: Thoughts on a Failed Recipe...

Isn't that a lovely loaf of sweet bread?

I was experimenting one night and swapped a single ingredient around in a quick bread recipe that I use regularly with great success. It wasn't even a big switch, damned near the equivalent of changing beer brands in beer bread, but it was apparently the exact wrong thing.

An overwhelming yeasty one-note 'aroma' gave way to a crumb that was somehow both gummy and dry and a profoundly bitter taste. There was no yeast and nearly a cup of sugar in one loaf, and the gummy/dry thing is just baffling. I literally took one bite and threw the rest away.

A blogger friend saw the photo and said, "You know, some people would just post the recipe...I mean it looks good." I got another note moments later saying "JUST KIDDING! Please don't tell anyone I said that." so I am not naming names.  glares at @redacted

This got me thinking about the less deliberate recipe failures that hit print and what heck is the bar for publishing recipes (and other things) anyway and what happens when the inevitable screwups happen. And they will...