The Adventure That Tastes Better With Practice

Once, a long time ago and well before I was a good cook, I wasn't. I wasn't a good cook yet and I wasn't a good baker yet. I was a beginner. And with being a beginner comes many opportunities to truly mess up. I messed up while baking cakes by somehow either burning them to a crisp or having them turn out completely underbaked and gooey. I made a potato kugel (if you don't know what that is, you need to buy my cookbook and make the one in there - you can thank me later) and even though it baked for 2 hours it somehow still tasted raw. I got pretty good at making my own vegetable-loaded tomato sauce for spaghetti, and the fire department only came to the house once.

As I learned, there were fewer mishaps and fewer disasters. That doesn't mean there were none, just fewer. There was that time that I panicked because the meat I had been cooking in a crockpot literally overnight was still red inside. Or the time I burned the chicken right before my in-laws came to dinner (fortunately they are Persian, so my husband dumped some lemon juice on it and they thought it was sour chicken with a crunchy tadig, so they were happy). But I also had many cooking successes and began to really enjoy making good food.

Even as I was beginning to really experiment and create my own recipes, I had a few spectacular fails. I may never live down that one marmalade icebox cake. It was that bad. But the more I cooked and baked, the better the food got and the fewer and fewer mess-ups there were. To this day, I still sometimes have a day where a recipe doesn't work out the way I was hoping it would or something goes wrong, but most of the time now my food comes out tasty and trauma-free.

So why did I tell you about all of my cooking disasters? Why tell you about all of my mistakes and messes? I want you to learn from my journey. Learn that with practice and determination, you can become a good cook or baker even if you aren't one yet. Learn that everyone starts out messing up, but eventually you can get better. Learn that you shouldn't put marmalade in your icebox cake. And learn to look at cooking and baking as an adventure...one that will taste better with practice!