I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never do it again. I had a rebellious moment and made a reckless decision. I substituted strawberries in place of plums and I will never do it again.
I decided to start off easy. I picked a beautiful, colorful salad. I did and still do feel very confident in my ability to put lettuce in a bowl and will have fun with the challenge of creating the rest of the salad. Done and done. I can handle this. I chose the Arugula Salad with Roasted Fruit and Panettone Croutons from Giada’s cookbook, Giada at Home.
Challenge: the grocery store doesn’t have any plums. Solution: That’s ok I have strawberries at home (NOT OK I found out later). Challenge: what on earth is panettone? Solution: ok I know this… I’ve seen Giada use it before I think. And I’m making croutons out of it so I have a feeling it is a type of bread. Thank goodness I had my iphone with me. I went from being the girl awkwardly looking from her shopping list to the names of the bread on the shelf to the girl awkwardly looking from pictures on her iphone to the bread on the shelf. And my final conclusion is… I know EXACTLY what panettone is AND they definitely don’t sell that festive and delicious type of Italian bread here. No plums and no panettone? Fail grocery store. Epic fail. So I grabbed a loaf of sweet, fruity Italian bread and called it even (and ate about half of it on my 3 minute drive home from the grocery store- yum!)
So the arugula is in the bowl. The squares of bread are in the process of becoming croutons in the oven. I mixed up the salad dressing and set it aside. I’m totally on a roll. On to the roasted fruit. I’m only feeling a little intimidated right now, but mostly I feel fairly confident. Chop fruit. Substitute my strawberries for the plums (again. Not ok.) Put the yummy sauce mixture on the fruit and the fruit on the pan. Take the beautifully baked croutons out, raise the oven temp and put the fruit in.
I can smell the sweetness of the cooking fruit. This is going to be so good! I have to take a look. I open the oven door just a bit and OH *#&$#@#*@$!!!! SMOKE! Just so everyone knows…smoke potentially leads to fire. Not good.
So I turn the oven off and the oven fan on. Ok its fine now. Fire free. However my fruit is not fully roasted yet, but it is a soggy syrupy juicy mess. UGH! This is why I should not have substituted the strawberries. I think the sweet, sugary juice from the strawberries spread all over the pan, which I am assuming the plums would not have done, and now the sugar in the sauce mixture is smoking on the pan because the extra juice made it spread everywhere AND the juice is leaking into the parchment paper on the pan and making the fruit taste like squishy sweet warm fruit, instead of perfectly roasted fruit, with just a hint of wax. Not ideal.
And the moral of the story is: recipes use specific ingredients for a reason. Reckless and thoughtless substituting is not ok. I will never ever do it ever ever again….
Yay. good cooking lesson.
Side Note: I included pictures as proof that I made this as requested by my lovely coworkers. However, my salad does not match the picture of Giada’s salad in the book. The few pieces of fruit you see are the ones I tried to save. I’m making dinner for my friends later this week… I’ll let you know how it goes!
Mallory Potock