When I was developing the Mix-and-Match Quick Bread story for Food Network Magazine’s May issue, I was taking a statistics class in graduate school, so math was on the brain. The whole concept of our mix-and-match stories is to give the reader (you) the ability to come up with an endless number of combinations using our suggested ingredients. With that in mind, I decided that I needed to make the whole development process as random as possible, to ensure that any combination would work. I typed up little slips of paper, each with the name of a potential ingredient. Then, I had my fellow test kitchen members (Andrea, Bob and Claudia) blindly pick out ingredients.

Look at some of the random combinations we came up with »