This has been a dismal week for kitchen adventures.  I began the week on Monday (duh, just like everyone!) with high hopes of being able to grind my own wheat in either my food processor or my Magic Bullet grinder.  While searching the Internet to see exactly how to do it, I realized that you CANNOT grind wheat properly in a grinder.  “Who cares?” I thought, “I can figure it out.”  umm, whatever.

Sunday night I had soaked wheat berries w/whey in my blender.  Apparently there is a blender pancake recipe that is supposed to “oh so delicious”.  ahem.  Perhaps if I had followed the directions it would have tasted better.  The wheat berries puffed up and looked vaguely like Sugar Smacks cereal.  As I whizzed around the pancake ingredients in my blender, I smugly thought “humph, I knew I could do it like I wanted,” only to come crashing back to reality as I poured the batter to the griddle.  The wheat berries did not grind up.  In fact, they sank to the bottom of the batter, leaving mostly eggs & milk @ the top.  Poor Rh, he slept in on Monday, so he got the pancakes full of the chewy, weirdly textured wheat berries.  He ate them as I had slathered them with creamcheese and blueberry preserves.  He’ll eat just about anything if it’s coated in sugar.

At least my yogurt set up and the Son of Grok banana bars were seriously good.  I also made coconut milk, which the kids really enjoyed and we used them in smoothies later in the week.  I set a batch of sauerkraut to ferment to be used on Thursday in a Ruben casserole.

I didn’t have any kitchen creations on Tuesday, though we did try the fermented Pineapple chutney I made last week.  Can I just say…..SOUR!!!  It was so sour I couldn’t even choke it down.  The stupid pickles which should have been sour were not, but the pineapple chutney which should have been sweet w/a hint of sour were ridiculous!  Needless to say, this pineapple chuntey went down the drain.

I did grind the wheat berries in my Magic Bullet blender.  I also ground up the sealing ring for that grinder attachment.  Good thing the Magic Bullet people sent me 4 additional sealing rings.  I set the newly ground wheat to soak with whey, olive oil, and water overnight.  I should have known disaster would strike by the stiff texture of the dough.  I had blinders on.

Wednesday dawned full of promise.  I put the soaked wheat into my Kitchen Aid mixer and added the yeast and additional flour.  My poor kitchen aide was working so hard.  I was smelling something that didn’t smell right, namely the motor starting to become stressed!  I should have aborted my attempt at fresh ground whole wheat bread right then, but I”m stubborn like that.  I set the dough to rise in the oven w/the light on.  The dough rose nicely.  I punched it down and put it into the loaf pans for it’s second rise.  I am still not sure what happened.  The loaves were rising.  Everything was going well, then all of a sudden, the dough fell.  Both of them.  They would never rise again, so I gave up and baked them…flat as all get out…I baked them.

Upon tasting this flat bread, I realized why you need a wheat grinder….bleh…it was so hard and crunchy!  It was almost like a seeded bread rather than a sandwich bread.  It was so hard that even Rh wouldn’t eat it and he LOVES bread.  This flat stiff bread has been turned into French toast, but it’s still not great.  It’ll be ok coated w/honey and butter. **updated to add, it was NOT ok with honey & butter.  It was still hard and just nasty.  This also went into the trash.  It’s not a good week for food waste in this house!**

I also attempted to make a farmer’s cheese or ricotta cheese with milk and lemon juice.  I saw a blog post about it and it looks amazingly simple.  Apparently I did something wrong.  I didn’t get big curds, but rather small curds.  After draining and resting, it looked more like parmesan cheese than ricotta.  Upon investigation last night, I realized ricotta cheese is made from the whey of mozzarella cheese.  So you need rennet….hmm, where can I buy rennet??  Seriously though, that was a lot of effort for a very small pay out.  Ricotta cheese, even organic & hormone free is relatively inexpensive and I use it so rarely, the work to make it isn’t justified by price savings.  Because of the ricotta cheese not setting up properly, we had zucchini lasagna casserole instead of strips of lasagna.  At least that tasted delicious.  :)

The reason I tell you all of my failures is because when you’re cooking “real food”, things will fail.  Not every dish will be Martha Stewart perfect.  Breads will not rise, cheese will not form curds, and sometimes fermenting goes too far.  Will this deter me from attempting new things?  No way, Jose.  Up next on my agenda is growing a starter for sourdough bread.  In fact, I’m off to get that started right about now.  Did you know that each sourdough starter is local to your area?  If you bought a San Francisco sourdough starter and brought it home to feed it and use, after a few days, it would no longer be considered a San Francisco starter?  Your local wild yeast would overtake the San Francisco yeast.  Interesting, isn’t it?  Don’t let kitchen failures stop you from trying new things.  The worst thing that’ll happen is you’ll have to throw it out and order pizza.  That’s not so bad, now is it??  :)

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.  Please be sure to drop by the Food Renegade and read all the other great FBF blog post!