The best food discoveries are made in the kitchen when you least expect. There is something magical in the concoction of odd pantry ingredients and yesterdays dinner leftovers. With a smidgen of this and a splash of that, a wonderful food creation is born.
Take risotto turned arancini for example. The best time to make arancini balls is when you already have left over risotto from the night before. The flavours of the risotto will have further infused overnight making the arancini extra delicious. Next day, all you have to do is roll the rissoto into balls, put a sneaky bit of cheese in the centre, batter then fry. Hey presto! The rissoto dinner has miraculously transformed into an arancini lunch.
There are times when inventions are merely one hit wonders. They are made and eaten one day and forgotten about the next. But sometimes, just sometimes, they make their debut on national TV, without your permission or due credit...
So way back when my friend and I were in high school, we were learning how to make a pizza in a home economics class. We were just adding some final touches to our pizza when we realised we had grated too much cheese. Oh no, what to do with all this cheese? So we had a lightbulb moment and decided to stuff the cheese through the crust. A cheesy stuffed crust pizza you could call it. Months later I'm watching TV and happen to view a pizza hut commercial with a new cheesy stuffed crust pizza. Huh? Who told them?!
What a coincidence! My friend and I were devastated. We definitely indulged in the conspiracy that the room was bugged at the time. Or maybe the teacher was a spy, preying on the young minds of children, waiting for just the right moment to snatch their creative thoughts and then trade them later to a conglomerate corporation for a hefty sum.
It turns out there are others alike. My brother's friend swears he invented the sausage and egg muffin before it retailed as the sausage and egg McMuffin. Trust no one!
The thing with innovation is that you're trialing something that has yet to be proven to work. So the risk of failure is probable for the first few attempts. But the fear of failure is a much larger risk because if you don't ever try, you won't ever know what could have been.
Olives x
0 thoughts on “Accidental Innovation…”
What young geniuses you and your friend are! hehe If only they had junior Masterchef in our day we would have totally won with our stuffed crust pizza .. that’s if we weren’t distracted by Bananas in Pyjamas tissue boxes with pictures of them blowing their noses… When they don’t even have noses!!! ahahahaha
ahahahah oh we totally would have won masterchef. those crazy bananas, just the thought of it is making me laugh.