Magic Square

     The magic didn't happen.  Last week, I decided to try my hand at arepas, a kind of South American corncake that works something like pita bread: properly prepared, it is easily split to form a pocket for sweet or savory filling.  The simple batter (water, salt and a special pre-cooked cornmeal) appealed to me, and they're usually pan-cooked.  I ordered the cornmeal and gave it a try this morning.

     Simple batters are never simple; popover batter is nothing more than egg, milk, melted butter and flour, but if properly made they puff up amazingly, light, hollow shapes to fill with breakfast goodies; get it wrong and you have baked hockey pucks, dense, hard and barely edible.  The tricks to getting them right are subtle and best learned by doing.  You have to add things in the proper order and mix them the correct way.  The same ingredients that make airy popovers and dense hockey pucks produce thin, delicious, non-rising Swedish pancakes when mixed and cooked differently.

     My arepas were a learning experience.  Leathery on the outside and soupy in the middle, cooking them longer didn't help.  I know (now) the batter was too wet, but there's plenty more to learn.  Like popovers, I'm probably going to have make lousy ones a few more times before the end result gets better.  Letting yourself make mistakes is one of the best ways to learn this kind of skill.  It goes faster if you're able to work with someone who knows what she's doing to guide you, but first efforts are still likely to be less than ideal.  You accept it and try again later.

     And the post title?  Not directly related, other than perhaps the "magic" aspect.  It's from the old Roman (and possibly early Christian and/or Jewish) magic square:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
     What does that mean?  Opinions vary; the linked article goes into considerable detail  Possibly no more than, "The farmer Arepo runs the plow," in every direction you read it, but of course we couldn't leave it at that.  Sadly, "Arepo" may be a made up word to make the square work; it is not a Latin nickname meaning "eater of flatcakes." (Students of Latin say "Arepo" is a harpax legomenon, which is not a particularly pointy Lego piece, but a word known through a single example: you will find it nowhere else in the language.)

     I had a backup ready for breakfast: fried red potatoes, cubed up, with some leftover sweet Italian sausage, bacon, scrambled eggs and two different kinds of pickled hot peppers.  Other than the potatoes, it was what I was planning to fill the arepas with.

     Next time!