Confessions of a Recipe-aholic

I like to eat.
I like to cook.
I like to read recipes.

Since I am alone, days go by without cooking anything. No days go by without reading recipes.
In magazines, on the internet, piled up in a file on my desk, or in the mail with an "offer." I read recipes.

If they have a great many ingredients, even though most are things I love, they will likely never be concocted. I'm also a big fan of few ingredients. Side note: I eat almost everything and enjoy almost all of that. Another side note: I very often change, vary or add to recipes ... even ones I'm making for the first time.

I have a lot of favorite recipes ... you can tell by the stuff that I have spilled on them. I have recipes in my mother's handwriting (and she did not like to cook!). I have scribbled on the back of napkin recipes, including a great one for jalapeno pie. I have recipes that I can't find but can remember the website from which they came so I can go print them again, Sara McLachlan's Writers Block Oatmeal Cookies ... recently refound on Land O' Lakes Butter website and printed, again.

But sometimes my love of looking up recipes outfoxes me. Case in point: Birthday Cupcakes for Kyndall's 4th. Last year for her 3rd (traditional party in the park) I found a really great recipe for white "graduation" cupcakes. They were easy to make and of delicious texture and flavor and tasted great with cream cheese frosting. But this year I chose the "theme" and because her current interests are mud pies and bugs, I thought chocolate cupcakes with buttercream frosting (sister Kallie doesn't care for cream cheese !) to showcase the precious caterpillars, ants and spiders that would top them. See, mud pies and bugs. This is where it went bad. I "searched" for "chocolate cupcakes" recipes and chose one that sounded sound. It had six squares of semi-sweet chocolate included and other normal cake stuff. I made them. I painstakingly (and if you know how crafty I am not, you get the "pain" part) created bugs by drawing legs and antennae with melted chocolate and bodies and heads of M&M's. See photo somewhere on this page. They turned out pretty durn cute. Guess what? The cake was awful. It was dry. It was chalkily chocolate. The were photographed, bitten into and put down. I threw most of them in the trash can at the park.

I'm just writing this so I will read it in early April next year and return to some tried and true cake recipe for our annual Happy Spring/Honor Grandma/Kyndall's Party at Washington on the Brazos State Park.

But, on a brighter note, the recipe I downloaded for "Creamy Chicken Pot Pie" that uses rotisserie chicken, corn chowder, corn and peas and a puff pastry crust turned out just fabulous and was a solid hit at the potluck lunch at church today.

So my cure is not on the horizon.