What I Learned From My Latest Kitchen Fail

This post first appeared on Mona Andrei’s personal blog, Moxie-Dude.

“So how did that maple-pecan cornmeal bread turn out?” That is today’s question.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can check Moxie-Dude to catch up.

If you do know what I’m talking about and sense the underlying sarcasm in the question, I both love you and hate you. Love you because it means you KNOW me and hate you because it means you KNOW me.

The answer to today’s question: How many bricks does it take to build a house?

While the results of my quasi-baking efforts looked good – maybe even great from certain angles – it turned out unbreakably hard and tasteless. And yet I followed the instructions to a tee.

I learned two things from trying to make that damn recipe:

1. I will NEVER conquer my kitchen. And …
2. Never judge a book by its cover. Or in this case, never judge a bread-making machine recipe by the simplicity of its instructions.

I have to commend Greg though on his attempt to make me feel better about this recent #KitchenFail. While still chewing his first bite, which took a while since the bread was hard and dry, he said, “Mmmm I love the corn taste …”

And then he must have questioned himself because right after swallowing, he asked, “It’s supposed to taste like corn, right?”

(The reason I knew he’d just swallowed is because I watched the bread go down his throat. It was like watching a snake digest a giraffe.)

So back to the drawing board I go.

Some of you may be wondering why I even bother. Why do something that I’m clearly not good at?

The answer?

Because even though my cooking turns out terrible 11 times out of 10, I still enjoy the process. The browsing through recipes … planning … buying the ingredients … looking up words like sauté to make sure I understand the meaning within the context … the stirring … taking pleasure in knowing where I keep the measuring spoons … recognizing that I even OWN measuring spoons …

It’s like pouring my soul into something with no attachment to the results. Yes, there’s a side of me that predicts the impending disaster. And wasteful is probably the best word to describe the consequences of my time in the kitchen – in both time and money. But while I so meticulously work at preparing my next mess, I’m in a zone of nothingness. No worrying. No thinking about the past or the future. Just focusing on what I’m doing in the “now”.

As I write this, I realize that there’s actually a third lesson to my maple-pecan cornmeal bread tragedy:

That a true labour of love is about living in the moment, with no attachments to the results and therefore no judgements.

Just because we’re not good at something doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy it – or that we shouldn’t do it.

So tell me, awesome readers, what’s your “thing”? What’s something that you know you will never be good at and yet still enjoy?