Bad Hush Puppies

 G’day eaters!

It’s be an almost extremely, definitely painfully long day over here. I had a ton of trouble sleeping last night — which never happens, by the way — and that just messed my whole day up.

By once I got off work I put my feet up and watched that episode of The Office from the second season where Micheal grills his foot on the George Foreman he keeps by his bed to cook bacon (which I am so jealous of!) and I instantly felt significantly better.

So now that that little story is over with, let’s talk about my failures.

In case you were under any delusions of my being awesome or perfect right out of the gate, let me dash those right now: I am so not even close to perfect. I make lots of mistakes. A lot of my recipes fail and I try to take way too many shortcuts.

Which brings me to tonight: hush puppies.

 I figured out what a third of the recipe would be and mixed the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients.

I whisked the two sets on ingredients just enough to combine and then let them sit while I heated the oil. 

 I fried the puppies in small batches so as not to affect the oil temperature, all the while saying things like, “I should fry everything!” and “I totally understand why Paula Deen has a built in fryer.”

I decided to test one of the beautiful brown little puppies before dinner. 

 And this is where I discovered my problem…

Apparently a frying thermometer is important and you can’t just eyeball the temperature of the oil by dipping a wooden spoon in and seeing if it bubbles steadily (meaning the oil is about 350F) or vigorously (meaning the oil is too hot). Because if you do just eyeball it you’ll end up with half cooked hush puppies. 

 If you can't tell from my poor photography skills, that's the very doughy center of a hush puppy. 

 Womp womp.

Oh well, I popped the whole lot of them into the toaster oven for a few minutes and then we magically had fully cooked, but still not tasty hush puppies.

So let this be a lesson to you, eaters: the temperature of things is very important when cooking