The Flipside of Failure

When beginning any recipe, whether self-invented or reproduced from some resource, the cook needs to understand that to transform raw ingredient to higher edibility is to undertake a complex and variable task that human beings have been doing since the beginning of time. And, furthermore, that since that first human heated or seasoned, the ingredients have been getting the best of us. Today, with the invention of preservatives as well as with the question of survival being put on the back burner, the result of a cooking "failure", in most, is the exclamation of expletives paired with a vow to never try again. And this is precisely the place where most stay -- in exasperation turned to indifference. I've talked to many people, from ages 6 to 60, that will, after making something, quickly put it down as "nothing" or as "just from a box". We think that cooking should be saved for the chefs and baking saved for the bakers. However, what they don't know is that there is such a freedom in the humble understanding that with the will and a little time, they can make anything they want. And, more importantly, that it doesn't need to be perfect. From any "failure", when considered, comes knowledge that can't be learned from any book or magazine.

To explain. The other night, a late one I might add, filled with too much italian vocabulary and, incidentally, too many cups of coffee, I decided to make new potato and red onion soup with thyme. This, I will tell you from the get-go, is a pretty bad pairing. I did it because the colors looked amazing and I thought "if baking potatoes and leeks work, why not this!". Needless to say, I was a little delirious. I shortly realized after cooking the onions in butter and then adding the potatoes, chicken broth and thyme, that red onions don't hold up under all that pressure. They get slippery and too sweet and, the potatoes, hard as rocks after 40 minutes of simmering. I, in a fit of passion, added some white wine vinegar and took the flavorless broth to a place much like a really acidic dog's breath. Alas, I dumped the inedible soup and took a seat at my counter stool to brood. Just when I began to think the age-old thoughts about failure as simply an end and the self-piteous why-do-I-even-try self-lecture, I stood up. I took note that now I know, for sure, that this combination is not a match. Also, I learned, contextually, about the textures of the red onion and the new potato as well as what happens when you add vinegar to chicken broth. I knew something that I didn't know before and not because i made a gourmet, applaudable soup but because I made a gross, flippant late-night soup with all the wrong ratios.

So, to wrap up a more metaphysical post, a "mess-up" can lead to a better dish later. And that the flipside of failure can lead to the fulfilling difference between a boxed cake or canned soup and something that you truly put yourself into.