Recipe testing part 1

So, a member of a LiveJournal community called cooking asked for folks to help her out. She's writing a cookbook, and she wanted people to test some of her recipes to get some feedback. I'm always willing to help out, especially when it leads to making (and eating!) great food. Since the author is hoping to sell the cookbook, I can't share the full recipes here, but I can show you some pictures and give you my thoughts on the process.

Our first meal was two recipes - Olive Oil and Garlic Steak, and Bacon Stuffing. We managed to use meat or broth from three different animals. Vegetarian we ain't.


The steak in process of searing. The steak was marinated in olive oil overnight, which made it beautifully tender. You can see a few of the garlic cloves in the pan in this picture - the garlic was placed in slits cut into the steak, and I don't think I cut them deep enough since so many fell out while cooking. This meant we were forced to eat pan-fried garlic with our steak and stuffing - oh, no!


The stuffing, fresh from the oven. We actually halved the recipe, as the original recipe makes serves six, and there are only two of us. The bacon is fried up before adding to the bacon, and in order to use up the entire package of bacon, we simply had to fry up the half not used for the stuffing and eat it while we prepped. It was torture, I tell you. The stuffing turned out beautifully - a little salty, but I blame myself for using the full amount of salt even though I halved the recipe.


And the finished plate - Eric took this picture. These two dishes worked very well together. We had been planning to steam some sugar snap peas to go with it, but we got so caught up in the bacon that we forgot to put them on. It's a seductive mistress, is bacon.

All in all, I would definitely make these recipes again. It was a little difficult making these and following the recipes as strictly as possible (with the exception of the salt fiasco), as I'm used to taking a recipe and then tweaking it. I wanted to try these as written, though, because that's the point of being a recipe tester.

Next time - Greek Stuffed Chicken and Roasted Garlic Basmati Rice.