Saturday, September 20, 2014

Pinterest Pins...Failures and Successes

Raise your hand if you're a Pinterest fan! Personally I have a love/hate relationship with the site.  I love the ease of finding ideas on there and the ability to organize my sometimes chaotic thoughts.  I love looking at pretty and eye catching images.  A lot of my time is wasted  occupied by perusing through the collection of pins that others have found.  It's like little virtual treasures.

Most of my pins are related to food--cookie and cake recipes and tips, dinner recipes, slow cooker recipes, even juicing recipes from that time of my life (once).  However sometimes I feel like some of the pins I find can be deceiving, especially the food ones.  The pins make the process look so simple and when executed by the amateur like me???  Well let's just say there have been a few failures and successes on my attempts.

This week I completed three recipes I found on Pinterest.  It all started when my husband looked in the fridge and found about 30 string cheeses that were about to expire (I bought a huge bag of them from Costco thinking I could totally eat them all...I know I'm not the only one that as done that!).  Then I recalled browsing Pinterest in the past and seeing some fun snack ideas with this ingredient.  I thought this was a good time to try them.  Of course not only did I find string cheese recipes, but I found about 10 other pins to add to my "Taking Care of My Tummy" board that were unrelated to string cheese.  So this week I attempted two string cheese recipes and one recipe for mini shepherd's pie.  Why shepherd's pie?  Well I also had pie dough in the freezer I thought I should use up.  Pie dough stays good in the freezer you say?  Whatever, I just wanted shepherd's pie, okay?!  hehe :)

Moving on, the first recipe I tried was oven baked mozzarella sticks found here (and if you scroll to the bottom there is another recipe for oven baked onion rings... yea, I added that pin to my collection too).  The ingredients and process looked simple enough: string cheese, bread crumbs, an egg, flour, and seasonings.  I followed the easy instructions and this is what happened:


This was a Pinterest FAIL.  The taste itself wasn't too bad though.  A little on the salty side, but over all not too bad.  The cheese all melted and because of that it became a big blob of cheesy-breadcrumb-thing.  I probably would not make this again.



Next on my list was a recipe for cheesy-stuffed garlic butter crescents found here.  I spruced it up a little by adding pepperoni because I saw that idea on a different pin and because I love pepperoni (and salami, and prusciutto, and pancetta, and bacon, and and and...).  This again also asked for easy ingredients and had simple steps.  As a result, this is what happened:





The oozing cheese...
















This was a Pinterest SUCCESS!  These were so tasty and addicting.  I dipped them in marinara sauce sprinkled with Italian seasoning and voila! It reminded me of an upscale pigs-in-a-blanket appetizer.  hehe Okay, not upscale, but a variation on crescent roll recipes.

And finally, the non-string cheese recipe I tried was mini shepherd's pie.  I saw someone else pin this recipe (found here) and it used muffin pans and ground beef.  However I remembered I got these really adorable mini pie dishes (thanks L & C!) and I had not tried using them yet.  I thought this would be a fabulous recipe to break them in with. I also decided to use ground lamb instead.  As with the other recipes, the ingredients and instructions were simple (see a trend?) so I said, "Why not?!  I love shepherd's pie!"  This dish also reminded me of our trip to the UK back in 2012 and ate lots of this stuff there.  That was a fun and delicious trip!  Here is what happened with this version of the recipe:






How cute are these little pie dishes?
I love that they are sunshine yellow!
This was a Pinterest SUCCESS!  At least I think so!  My husband has yet to try his so I will update you on what he thinks later.  The ground lamb brought a different dimension to the flavors of this dish and the crust gave it another textured layer that was quite delightful!  I would definitely recommend you all trying this recipe!






Well, that's it for now.  I'm sure I will post many more reviews on things I have found using Pinterest and letting you know if they are failures or successes.  In the meantime, this is a fun site I found (while on Facebook, not Pinterest) about other people's Pinterest failures.  It's quite funny!!!  Check it out here and have fun nom nom nomming! :)

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