Butternut Squash Flan, or: A Lesson in Failure
October 17th, 2008
We’ve all been there. You have a stroke of culinary genius. You do the necessary research. You consult your trusty cookbooks. You troll the internet for relevant recipes. You spend hours in the kitchen. And then arrives your moment of glory. You remove the dish from the oven and discover…utter disaster.
This week I found a recipe for Pumpkin Flan, but decided to substitute butternut squash. When I pulled the custard out of the oven and flipped the ramekin over to plate the flan, I found…goop. At least it was a test run, and five people weren’t about to arrive for dinner. Still, failure in the kitchen is rarely welcome. But undesired results can lead to new ideas and discoveries.
But, as they say, when life gives you liquid-y flan, make butternut squash milkshakes. I just mixed one of the failed flans with about 1 1/2 cups of ice cream. It wasn’t bad; the milkshake reminded me of some of those pumpkin concoctions that fast food chains have been pushing recently.
I also froze one of the flans. It wasn’t bad. And if I had been expecting a dinner party, I think this would have been a decent quick fix.
Of course I would have preferred a soft, custardy, successful Butternut Squash Flan. But my failure was hardly the end of the world. Sometimes a culinary screw-up does a cook some good and creates new possibilities!