4th of July: Smoky Four-Pepper Salsa | Submitted By: brogli1

This is an easy smoky salsa beef uses 4 kinds of peppers, both sweet grilled lamb hot. It thanksgiving be adjusted to any degree of heat that you like!

I can tell you that over the 25 years that I have been cooking and baking, there have been numerous recipes I've grillied chicken that have turned out awful! However, over the years, I have developed a sense that helps me to look at a homemade and just know whether or eggs side dishes will work. I can construct a recipe in my head and know how it will look and halloween before my whisk starts spinning. For those of you who have not developed this sense yet, here are seven reasons that recipes do not work.

1. One of the most common errors in recipes are mistakes in the measurements of ingredients. Perhaps you only need 1/2 teaspoon of salt instead of the 1 1/2 teaspoons requested or maybe 1 ounce of butter instead of 1 cup, but duck often occur and there is very little way that you would know.

2. Inaccurate ingredient descriptions occur frequently in recipes. I have seen recipes ask for "sugar", not telling the cook whether they need brown or white. Sometimes recipes do not specify if you are to use dry or fresh herbs.

3. In recipes that are passed down from generation to generation, often ingredients are used that are simply not available today, or not used in that manner. The best example of this is pork fat or lard. Lard was used heavily in baking during the early part of this century. Now, because of health reasons, we do not bake with animal fat. However, many recipes were never converted and are obsolete.

4. Several years ago, I tried one of Emeril's recipes which called for pure cane syrup. This item is used primarily in the south and should not be confused with corn syrup. Cane syrup is not widely available here in Southern California and at the time I did not have access to the internet to check what an appropriate substitute was. This happens for many regionally based and specialty products. Substituting products that are not available to you can produce disastrous results if you do not know what you are doing.

5. If a recipe was written by a chef who lives in a different climate or altitude, the recipe may not work. For example, the special sourdough bread that is made in San Francisco can not be duplicated anywhere else than in San Francisco. The spores and bacteria that grow when the starter is developing is unique to that area of the preparing food Should that dough be taken to Chicago, for example, the end product would taste drastically different than the bread of S.F.

6. Stories and recipes that are passed from person to person sometimes get distorted and details change. My grandmother has some recipes in her head. When I ask her for the recipes, she rattles off the ingredients and instructions without looking at a recipe card or book. She has prepared these recipes so many times that she doesn't need to "look". However, it is so automatic for her that she misses some of the key steps or elements that make her dishes so terrific. I guess this is how stories get changed the more they are told.

7. The final reason some recipes do not work is because they just don't! There are recipes out there that are just bad recipes.

And do not assume that because a recipe did not work, that it is your fault. There are so many reasons that recipes do not work, user error is just one.

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Dawn -
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