A Few Kitchen Fails and Bacon Fat Gingersnaps!

After two failed recipe attempts over the past couple of weeks, I don’t know what happened, they started off as good ideas but they fell a little short of what I was aiming for.

The first recipe I wanted to make was to use up a half bottle of champagne; I was thinking to cook the chicken in it with some lemon and capers. Well the taste was ok but the look wasn’t what I was going for, so I’m thinking when I try this one again I will use the champagne as a sauce to serve over the chicken.

The second recipe was to use a bottle of Voodoo Maple Bacon Ale that my daughter had gotten for me. I didn’t like the flavor on its own so I figured hey why not cook with it. So I decided to use the pork chops I had on hand and pour the ale over it with a few seasonings and put it in the slow cooker. Sounded like a good idea and it even smelled good when I came home, but the taste was bitter. Only thing I can think of is that it was cooked too long and should have been mixed into a sauce and added at the last few moments of cooking.

“I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

You would think I was done with cooking after those two fails, but nope, I will try again with both of these, though I don’t think I’m going to get the Voodoo Maple Bacon Ale I will use something else.

Well that left me with ok what to write and cook for the week, well I had found a great cookie recipe from one of my favorite blogs “Bourbon & Brown Sugar”, for a bourbon laced gingersnap cookie and since I love gingersnaps and I had everything in the cabinet, let’s make cookies.

I followed her directions with a couple of twists. In the directions she used her food processor to blend the ingredients, I have one but it’s packed away as I am in between homes and okay I was lazy and did not want to go through that stack of boxes to find my big one and the small one that I have out would have taken forever to mix (I’m lazy, shoot me).

The second thing is I used some of that maple bacon ale instead of bourbon (next time I will use bourbon or rum, I like booze).

The cookies came out with a great color and that good ginger flavor, just a little too much bacon flavor don’t know it if was due to the ale I added or too much bacon fat, so next time and yes there will be a next time I’m going to use just a little less of the bacon fat.

Yes this has been interesting and I’m glad I don’t listen to that little voice in my head that tells me I can’t make it, but I am looking forward to taking some time off so that I can finally get this blog set up over to my self-hosted site and really see what happens with future cooking experiments.

Recipe adapted from Bourbon & Brown Sugar, (no longer up and running it looks like, but I will be remaking these cookies this summer and will use a good KC bourbon for that little punch that’s needed.