Year in Review - Misses, failures and learning experiences

 Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. 

 ~Henry Ford

Big Christmas gap in the blog, but great news - Santa brought us a fancy new Nikon 3100D Camera.  Fabulous blog pics for 2011!  I have several posts working from the holiday fanfare, also working on a 2011 Blog Review/Resolutions post. I have big plans for my little blog in 2011, stay tuned and tell some friends.  Before we ring in the new, we must honor and review the past.  The following are my fun failures and contest misses.  I use the word failure with the utmost pride for I believe any good cook must have much failure to be great.  So here is to failing so we might success in 2011!

Not a failure merely a miss.  Egg and Sausage Empanadas:  Did not enter this in the Jimmy Dean contest.  It needs more testing. They were really dry.  I think it could be done, but maybe isn't super original and I need to find a way to keep them moist.

Cranberry Marinaded Pork Chops:  Nice chops, just didn't get the cranberry taste so I didn't bother entering them.  Just a miss for this contest, decent meal.

Shepards Pie experiment gone wrong.  Actually the color was not the bad thing about this, the orange side is Hubbard squash mixed with some mashed potatoes.  I played around with the meat mixture under the rainbow potatoes and that was not so good.  Squash topped pie - ok.  Sausage pie base - not so good.

Fish Soup.  Was suppose to be like the pho soups you find at the good Vietnamese noodle houses, but the Gordon's fish product had a seasoning of it's own that made for an odd flavored broth.  Not a good kind of odd.  The end result was ok looking, not so good tasting.  Probably should call this one a failure.

Cookie Dome.  I was playing around with Pillsbury cookie dough.  What did we learn?  You can't make molds out of Pillsbury cookie dough.  I tried a few things, inside a dome bowl, outside a dome bowl, in the bundt, outside the bundt; it just does not work.  Still experimenting and looking for my own original Pillsbury creation.

Monkey Bread gone wild!  Another Pillsbury miss, well I just used too small a pan, so not a failure.  Still tasted great.

Calamari.  I think myself adventurous in the kitchen and squid/calamari are not all that "out there" but to clean a whole squid and prepare calamari is not for the faint of heart.  I hate to admit it, but I actually gave up and put the squid back in the freezer for another time.  Uncle Joe is a real Portuguese, he can handle whole squid, I'll wait till he can help or make something yummy for me.  Not a fan of whole squid.  Failure.