Look at that picture! Hot damn do I love that picture. I had just gotten a new lens for my camera (If you have a Nikon camera this lens is the shit and it’s inexpensive.) and I needed some recipes so I could put it through it’s paces. Doing low carb at the time, I figured a homemade beef jerky recipe would be perfect. Not only could I put together a nice piece for the website, but I’d also end up with some delicious beef jerky.

Good intentions often end in miserable failure.

I decided to make a ground beef jerky as I’d made the simple dried jerky before and that’s a boring ass recipe. Things started out fine, I got that sexy shot of the meat all ground up in the food processor, added some seasonings and then I took this frankly, disgusting shot: 

Isn’t that appetizing? Mmmm, mish-mash meat. I’m salivating.

I should have stopped right there and given that to my dog. That would have been the wise thing to do. But I am a complete moron, this is well recorded. So I rolled this meat out between to sheets of wax paper until it was incredibly thin.

I figured that since the box of wax paper says all over the damn thing that’s it’s “great for baking” that it would be cool to just leave the meat on the wax paper while it cooked. It was at low temperatures, right?

Not right at all. By the time the jerky was done that wax paper had joined forces with the meat to combine one inseparable soul. So those people at Cut-Rite can kiss my big Irish ass.

Additionally, the meat had become very brittle and offered the most unpleasant texture to anyone daring enough to eat it. I still tried to force the issue by getting some showcase shots of the final product for the website, but that too, sucked:

If that doesn’t look like tree bark…and it didn’t taste much different than bark either, so it was the whole package.

What a waste.

In the end, my dog did get to eat the meat, or what was left of it, you certainly couldn’t call it meat.

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I don’t know what I watching, but I saw someone on television throw together a very nice looking potato tart with sliced and layered potatoes.  It looked so easy.  Slice the potatoes, layer them with with a bit of salt and pepper and top with some chopped bacon.  That will take 10 minutes I said. 

Well, it turns out that my first mistake was being a complete lazy S.O.B.  I didn’t take the two minutes to peel the potatoes.  Stupid.  I figured that the potatoes were going to be sliced so thin that the little bit of peel would be inconspicuous, no way you’d ever be able to taste it.  Little did I realize that all of those little pieces of peel added up to a lot of peel that made eating the thing a trying experience.  I might as well have just strung a whole box of dental floss through the thing. 

Although the peel wasn’t very appetizing it certainly didn’t prevent me from eating it.  The salt did that. 

On television, the person placed salt and pepper on top of every layer, so I did too.  As I was putting it together I thought that it might be a bit too much salt, but they are potatoes and they can probably take quite a bit. 

Nope. It tasted horrible.  It was so incredibly salty, nothing could be done to correct it.  So I did what any intelligent person would have done, I threw cut it up and threw it on my front porch to melt the ice.

I only kid.  I wouldn’t want to kill any of the numerous cats that roam my neighborhood. Ok, maybe I would.

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It seemed like a good idea and simple too.  Make a pie filing with the apples, stuff it into the egg roll wrappers and fry the little guys up.  Those apple pies at McDonalds aren’t too much different and they taste great. (Well, they used to taste great, when they were deep fried.)

I made the filling and it tasted great.  Wrapping it in the egg roll wrappers was a snap, I had a nice line of plump, round egg rolls waiting to be fried.  This is when things started to go down hill.

The frying worked out fine until the egg rolls were taken out, but the heat from frying heated up the filling enough that it released all kinds of moisture.  Within seconds of being removed from the heat the egg rolls deflated and pretty soon I had a rack full of what looked to be deep fried sweat socks.  Nice. 

Not only were they horrible to look at but they tasted awful.  The texture was so distracting they could have been filled with the most delicious thing on planet earth and I wouldn’t have noticed. 

I still brought them to the dinner because at that point I had invested so much time in this brilliant idea that there wasn’t time for anything else.  My Mom and sister ate them, saying they were good, but I think it was just because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

Could it be fixed?

Maybe.  They only two things I can think to do to fix this would be to either cook the apple filling much longer to extract as much moisture as possible or after wrapping them stick them into the freezer for a few hours.  The thought being that if frozen, the filling wouldn’t have enough time to heat up and release moisture.

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