I had a disaster this evening when a recipe didn’t work. I don’t suppose I’m the only person this ever happens to but you’d never think so from reading most food blogs. In food blog world, the sun is always shining, crockery matches, flowers are strategically placed and the food always tastes delicious.
Not in my kitchen! It’s just that, like most people, I just don’t normally write about it. It’s doubly annoying because on Friday night I had some visitors and I cooked a really delicious, well presented set of Thai and Vietnamese dishes and forgot to take photos. In fact, this recipe was made from ingredients leftover from those dishes.
I’d only made a few dishes from Asian Vegan Kitchen but they’d all been really tasty. So I was excited all day to try these Vietnamese pancakes, with a green papaya salad that I’d made before and knew I enjoyed. The salad consisted of grated papaya with green beans, tomatoes, garlic, chilli, soy sauce and lemon juice. It’s really fresh, tasty and zingy.
The pancakes were quite a different story. The filling was a simple stir fry but the pancakes were totally new to me, made with rice flour and coconut milk. A quick google shows that these pancakes tend to be naturally vegan, which is always a big plus with me. Mine looked OK when I poured them into the pan but they broke up very easily when I tried to flip them. And when I tried to get them out of the pan with the stir fry in they just completely fell apart!! They still looked alright so we decided to eat them. I couldn’t really have dipped them into the dipping sauce so I just poured it over the pancakes.
They were actually remarkably tasty and I shall definitely go on a hunt for another recipe so that I can try them again and hope that they don’t fall apart next time. But I realised that not all recipes work – you know that and I know that! Let’s not be so shy about naming them….
Cooking the Vegan Books 
Pancakes are not my friends. Not when they came out of a box, and now when I try to make them myself. They are one of the foods I’ve deemed the boyfriend’s area of expertise.
More people should embrace their food blog “failures.” I should, at least.
I agree, recipe failures should be blogged about. I can’t remember anything that went disastrously wrong recently (apart from a focaccia, but my camera was in hiding) but as I’m attempting some dim sum this weekend this might change…
I blog failures, as long as they’re at least interesting to read about. Yours at least looks really tasty!