Cooking 101

So, Allyson and I have been cooking and baking up a storm recently. We have been doing a great job too, I might add. Delicious meals, desserts, and even a few loaves of moist wheat bread. Featured below is a tray of mini watermelon popsicles we made. To do this we cut up a watermelon that was getting mealy and put it in the blender, poured the mixture into ice cube trays, covered it with foil, and stuck one toothpick in each section. The result was quite delightful.Just was we were feeling very Martha Stewart-ish, we tried an experiment that didn't go so well. Actually, it was a disaster. I love my mom and grandma's homemade fruit leather (fruit roll-ups). Since Allyson and I had a ton of blueberries in the fridge that were starting to get mushy, I decided that we could use them in a berry medley leather. I'm not exactly sure where we went wrong. We mixed a banana, a nectarine, strawberries, and a ton of blueberries in a blender, poured the mixture onto a pan sprayed with Pam, and baked it for 8 hours at 150 degrees. Unfortunately, this is how it turned out:

First of all, you can see it had a serious shrinkage problem. Also, it felt a little bit rubbery on the top and was still oozy/liquidy on the bottom. I am not sure if our downfall was mixing multiple types of fruits together, the amount of mixture we used, the fact that the oven only had a "warm" setting for anything below 200 degrees, or that we had to take it out during dinner preparation to bake tortilla shells so they hardened into little bowls for our taco salad (just make balls out of tin foil and shape the tortilla shells around it, then bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees). Whatever the reason, the leather was a complete flop. I am kind of embarrassed that I screwed up something as "easy" as fruit leather. Mom, call me after you read this to help me figure out what the issue was (other than it was me making it and not you). In addition to my culinary catastrophe, I just noticed that my hair do today looks strikingly similar to the way Shirley Temple used to have hers. The tight curls worked for her...not so much for me. Dang humidity. See what I mean? You know you can see the resemblance.

I think I am going to go eat another piece of humble pie, just for good measure...