Failed apricots

The Seasonal Cook praises food blogs thus:

Reading many food writers can leave you with a sense of unworthiness. Everything they make sounds so good. Everything they eat is beautiful, nutritious, fresh and perfectly cooked. It's irritating.

Food blogs provide a nice corrective to traditional food writing. Regular people who describe the regular cooking in their lives write about overcooked meals, undercooked meals, fallen cakes, undersalted meat, dull soups. I have made all of these and more. Usually, at this point in my life, I can be fairly confident that anything I cook will be pretty good. (My early twenties, on the other hand, were a pretty sketchy time, culinarily speaking.) Sometimes, I achieve excellence. Maybe once a year I achieve transcendence. Sometimes, my food is edible, but not what you would call good. Sometimes, I fail utterly.

So in the interest of not being the kind of food writer the Seasonal Cook dislikes, I'm sharing a recent disaster.



These apricots in vanilla syrup with sour cream whipped cream look nice. (To make sour cream whipped cream, use half whipping cream and half sour cream and whisk until it's the thickness you desire. You can add a little sugar at the beginning or the end--the difference, as Jacques Pépin taught me on television, is immaterial.)

Too bad they tasted terrible. The apricots, which I was so excited to find at the farmer's market, were quite sour but not sweet. I thought a quick cooking in syrup would improve them but it didn't. It just made them mushy and bad. We each took one bite of this and said yeech, scrapping dessert altogether and returning to our televised entertainment. SC is right: every dish can't be a winner.