Cooking up more strange stuff

As I mentioned last week, my former job was a recipe developer.  I was given a product and had to use it as an ingredient in a recipe, which might be printed on the back of the packaging or perhaps put on a website for users to access. For three years, I worked for a company that made gravy, sauce, and bakery mixes. After a while, you use up the run-of-the-mill recipe ideas for beef gravy or pancake mix and start to get a little creative (read: weird).

Here is a list of the some of the strange recipes I made:

• Rootbeer Float Pancakes: I had to come up with 15 pancake recipes in one week. (And we're not talking about "Add 1 cup blueberries.") I used rootbeer instead of milk to make the pancakes. They tasted a little strange with maple syrup, but they very tasty with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
• Instant Stuffing Sauce: A restaurant chain wanted a mix they could combine with water and pour over day-old biscuits to make stuffing. It smelled just like Stove-Top , but was kind of thick and sticky so that it didn't make the biscuits soggy.
• Mole Sauce: Mole (pronounced Mow - lay) is a wonderful Mexican sauce made from roasted chilis, corn tortillas, almonds and chocolate. Somehow, I managed to turn Beef Gravy mix into a passable mole (OK, not passable here in San Antonio, but they accepted up north just fine). This one took me about twelve attempts to get it right. 
• Chocolate Cream Pie: I made chocolate pudding out of Biscuit Gravy. This is not quite as weird as it seems when you realize that biscuit gravy is basically flour, corn starch and milk (no seasonings), which are the same main ingredients as pudding. I made up the hot gravy and stirred in sugar and chocolate chips. When the chocolate was melted, I poured it in a prebake pie shell and topped it with whipped cream. OK, yeah, that is pretty weird.

So there you have it: culinary strangeness.

If you missed it, go check out my last post on recipe development as a writing analogy for a little contest. Comment here or at that post and there might be a cup of coffee in it for you (I'm giving away a $5 Starbucks gift card -- sorry, I'm cheap these days as I am no longer employed as a recipe developer!).