Porter Airlines hands out single-serving bags of Terra Exotic Vegetable Chips on their flights. Exotic as in taro and yuca, along with the more humdrum beet, parsnip and sweet potato. According to the website, they are 100% natural and each ounce contains a full serving of vegetables. Vegetables way more appealing than their traditional dinner guises. They're not only exotic but beautiful--red, orange and yellow crispy disks, and just like regular potato chips, basically a vehicle to get fat and salt into your mouth.
So why not try making them at home, I say? Said. And regretted.
Don't do it. Forget culinary DIY unprocessed maker hooptedoodle. Some things are better purchased. That's what I learned when I tried to make beet chips tonight based (okay, loosely based) on a googled recipe. Here's why you shouldn't.
1. It's a mess. Anyone know an easier way of doing this?
2. A bloody disaster. The recipe called for cutting the beets into 1/16th inch slices with a mandoline, which I don't have, and guess what? That thing that kind of looks like a mandoline on a cheese grater won't do the job. The processer sliced, but only made small pieces.
4. They looked okay at this point, although the people who loathe beets (everyone but me) weren't happy about the smell.
5. Voilà! Unevenly cooked beet chips--some wet and repulsive, a very few perfectly done, some burned. And I don't have time to stand there plucking each cherished crisp from the oven as it reaches peak done-ness. As the recipe-writer does, apparently.
