The recipes for this post were quite the roller coaster. Failure is good. Builds character. Keeps you humble. Makes you learn.
Saw a lovely post on Pinterest about this little Italian cracker from Puglia that is served with wine, the taralli. Sort of like a pretzel, but round, and with fennel seeds inside. That was my cooking project for the week. I was seeing a beautiful antipasto platter, some friends over for wine. Yeah. It was gonna be awesome. Did the usual, researched a bunch of recipes, compared the techniques and ingredients ratios, yatta yatta. Made a special trip to get some cheap white wine (an essential ingredient), and we were ready to rock and roll. Saturday morning came, and I was happily makin’ my taralli dough. Rolling out the little snakes, looping ‘em. It was like play time with play dough. Boiled ‘em. Baked em. … Burned ‘em. Oy. And those little fuckers were like rocks, even the not-so-burned ones.
I go back to my research. Decide to search for a YouTube tutorial. See what I did wrong (they needed to be much, much fatter. And not burned.) Start over. Boil ‘em. Bake ‘em. Hmm…..they sure look pretty.
Rocks. Every one. Now of course himself comes home and pronounces them delicious, and says that I can’t enjoy them because of my chicklet teeth. (It’s how we show our love, people.) But I’m annoyed – the video lady could break one in one hand, and it takes me effort to snap my little rocks in two with both hands. Alas….gorran crackers.
On the top of the roller coaster of a cooking morning, however, is a great little grissini recipe that actually worked. And was fun, again in a playdough-snakes kind of way. I went so easy on the rosemary, however, you can barely taste it. And, I didn’t like the slight sweetness. So, next time, more rosemary, less sugar, and add garlic. Or maybe do smoked Spanish paprika and garlic and thyme.
I’m still heartily annoyed to be bested by a fucking cracker. But the thrill is gone, and I don’t know if I want to invest more time to see if I can get some lovely light crunchy wine crackers.
It was good plan, at any rate. Here’s the grissini link again – give it a try! They would make an awesome project with kids for a spaghetti dinner.
