Blooper Friday! Potato Tortilla Fail!

Let me start off by saying that this was delicious - it only looks like a pile of goop. The problem definitely was not with the recipe or the food itself. It came from our wonderful Spanish cookbook that we love and the problem was certainly user error and lack of Spanish cooking skills.

We saw our Spanish friend who gave us the cookbook recently and asked her about how we managed to mess this up so badly.  She gave us some good tips that hopefully will lead to a tortilla that looks like a tortilla next time.  We definitely hope to share this recipe with you in the future as a success story.  For now, we give you another edition of Blooper Friday! aka your chance to laugh at us.  But it's ok, we have a good sense of humor about our failures!

Once upon a time there was... Amaretto Cream Sauce

While we are big fans of alcohol in cooking, we think amaretto is an underused ingredient. There are always recipes with wine and beer and even rum - but amaretto? Not often. We have a delicious recipe for an Amaretto Cake, but amaretto in a cream sauce is a whole new type of deliciousness. Variations of this recipe are all over the web.

Once upon a time there was... Mediterranean Couscous

This is one of our all-time favorite easy recipes to whip up for weekday lunches.  We bought a pre-made package of a similar couscous at Wegmans one time and thought it was good - but needed work.  So a few attempts later, we made up our own recipe.  This is a Castle Farm original!

All the stuff you put in it can be adjusted of course.

Blooper Friday! Chicken with Red Wine Fail

Looks great right? Well just be glad you didn't try to eat it.

We've decided to start a new tradition we call Blooper Friday!  Sometimes we make a recipe, (like this one), and it looks beautiful, but something goes wrong and it tastes terrible... Other times, it tastes great but doesn't look very pretty.  We don't think we should post a recipe that didn't work out, but we also think keeping these pictures to ourselves would be a waste!

We've got some bloopers set up for the next few weeks, but hopefully we won't have so many that this will be an EVERY Friday tradition...

Here's what happened:

Once upon a time there was... Mango and Pineapple Sorbet

Since we were making an Indonesian Beef Stew, we decided we would stick with the Southeast Asian theme and make a complimentary dessert. We found this recipe for a sorbet at Williams-Sonoma's website and it is perfect because mangoes and pineapples are pretty much the only fruits in season right now! Plus, we always like an excuse to use our ice cream maker. We also like excuses to eat delicious things. So really this all worked out very well for us.

You will find these instructions are not very specific because they depend a lot on your model of ice cream maker. We have the Kitchenaid mixer attachment, so if you have any questions for this, leave us a comment.

Once upon a time there was... Indonesian Beef Stew

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It seems like we make a lot of beef stew.  There's this beer and beef stew, this french beef stew, and now Indonesian Beef Stew.  There are two reasons for this: they are all very different and we really like beef stew.  Even Cal understands how it is.

So, onto the recipe.  We found this in Williams-Sonoma's Slow Cooker book.

Penguins Present: Pig and Cow on a Stick!

testing, testing... We're in!  Skipper I've hacked into the main account.

Outstanding.  All right boys, commence Operation: Penguin Cookbook Blog! Here's a recipe for invasion.