Food Disasters-8/17/10

I really have been lucky.  For as much as I cook, I really should have some better stories about the stuff I've messed up on than I do.  Really, other than a Polish meal my friend Heather and I made that the salt got away from and a white chocolate cranberry cheesecake that Richard swears was the worst thing he's ever eaten, I've got very little.   (A few early blog posts may beg to differ but let's not go into that now.)   The only reason I even thought of food failures tonight is that once again I made something with white chocolate and once again, it did me wrong.   You can't really tell in the picture (I guess that was the point.) but tonight's White Chocolate Cherry Mousse Pie was full of tiny little white lumps.  They weren't lumps of chocolate as far as I could tell.  The mousse didn't congeal smoothly and it was off putting.  The cherry compote was wonderful but the pie itself, either because of or in spite of the lumps, didn't have a uniform taste.  Sometimes it tasted more like white chocolate (which incidentally, I'm not a big fan of) and sometimes it seemed more beaten egg.  I felt I mixed the components well but something went wrong in the chemistry on the dessert.  
The main dishes went a bit better.  My first dish was Tagliatelle with Fresh Corn Pesto, a recipe I'd stolen off the corn menu mentioned in an earlier post.  I plan to make the rest of the menu tomorrow but that menu looked too big for just the three of us so I split it up.  This pasta dish was a creative twist on the green basil pesto we are more familiar with.  I really enjoyed the dish and found both the use of bacon and flavorful corn would make this a very filling almost meatless main by itself.  The pesto was easy to make and adhered well to the pasta, the sign of a good pasta dish.  
I also made the Quick-Brined Grilled Pork Chops with Balsamic Glaze on page 53.  If you saw the recipe in the magazine you would notice that "with Treviso" is missing and rightly so.  I shopped at Publix today and they had neither radicchio nor endive so I just left these out of the dish.  This was a simple dish with a reduced Balsamic vinegar dressing.  I wouldn't say the chops were spectacular but as often true in this project, I learned how simple it is to make a very glamorous sounding sauce that could spice up chicken, beef, or pork.

Quick-Brined Grilled Pork Chop with Treviso and Balsamic Glaze-B
White-Chocolate Cherry Mousse Pie-C

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