InsaneJournal

Current mood:	cheerful
Current music:	Gackt - Flower

Foody food food
Occasionally, I do something utterly genius when it comes to food.

I've been fond of Heidi Swanson's olive oil cracker recipe for quite a while now, though I make them rather differently - I usually cut the recipe down to half, for one (did you know it's actually rather easy to guesstimate what 1/6 of a cup of olive oil looks like?), and I don't bother making them with expensive or "specialty" flours - I either use bread flour, if I feel up to a vigorous session of kneading and putting dough through the pasta machine attachment for Mom's mixer, or regular all-purpose flour. (If I'm making a full batch, I use both.) They're quite no-fuss, bake up nicely, and are very good to munch on at the most random moments - I adore them, but it's just been too damn hot to bake anything lately unless it's in the middle of the night, and I don't think anyone would appreciate me running the pasta machine at that hour. But, tonight proved cool enough to whip up a batch, and I decided that I wanted to do something different for half of the crackers this time (aren't I ambitious!) instead of just topping them with salt.

I looked around the kitchen, pondered rifling through the spice jars, and then spotted the grinder of Weber Six-Pepper Fusion on the back of the stove.

Hmmmmm.

Figuring "why not?", I grabbed the grinder and peppered the first baking sheet of crackers with, well, pepper.

Despite a few little mishaps (protip: don't lead with your face when using the oven, especially not when baking with pepper - hot air in the face is bad enough, but it sure did clear my sinuses!) and the agony of waiting, I managed to pull off something I can only rarely do and take them out of the oven perfectly cooked and wonderfully crispy. Triumphant and hungry, I couldn't even wait for them to cool down; I spatula'd them deftly off the baking sheet onto a plate, eyed them for all of five seconds, then snatched one up and juggled it from hand to hand till it became cool enough to hold...and then I bit in.

Bliss. Utterly orgasmic, tastebud-tingling bliss.

I blinked, savored the flavor, then chomped down the rest of it lickety-split and rushed a cracker each first to Mom, then to Dad; each proclaimed them tasty, and that sense of pure satisfaction you get when you've just made a wonderful culinary creation rushed through me, setting my nerves to tingling as surely as the pepper had done to my tongue. "Yes," I thought to myself proudly, "I will make these again."

And then, like any internet-haunting blogger girl worth her salt (...or pepper? Hee hee) would do, I wrote a strangely poetic and storylike post about my cracker experience and posted it here.

Still munching, by the way. Bliss. ♥