I often wonder "What is the Internet really good for?" (besides stalking your exes, reading celebrity gossip blogs, reading non-celebrity blogs, watching things on hulu.com, finding out which political candidates think God talks to them (and since when is hearing voices in your head not a sign of a mental disorder?), and ordering feral cat traps on-line).
The answer to this is clearly: recipes. Whereas before you had to page through multiple expensive cookbooks to find a recipe that looks great in the picture but turns out to taste terrible, now you can accomplish that much more easily. And it's free (aside from the $72 you spend on the spices that you'll never use again).
This week I had extra tomatoes in my CSA box. I'm not a big fan of anything but cherry tomatoes, and the beefsteak tomatoes that I had in my box were so ripe that they wouldn't even make the trip to work. But we've established that the one thing I have in abundance is sun. So I decided to make sun-dried tomatoes.
As with most new things that I try, I can't really blame my problems on anyone but me. It clearly says that Roma tomatoes are the best choice, and that the tomatoes shouldn't be overly-ripe, and that if you use something other than a Roma, you should probably remove the seeds. I ignored all of this advice, because really, are you going to believe everything you read on the Internet?
So I sliced tomato wedges, threw them on a cookie sheet with some salt, covered the whole thing in cheesecloth, put it outside on the patio, and forgot about it for four days.
The good news is that I have sun-dried tomatoes.
The bad news is that these suckers were welded to the pan. In fact, I had to soak the pan to get them off, which sort of negates the whole drying process. But the one piece that I pried off with a knife tasted like a sun-dried tomato.
So... next time I'll fail differently. That's all you can really ask for.
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