Trial and Error

You know, sometimes the food I cook sucks. It's not always my fault, but most of the time it is. Jenny and I, in our relentless search for new flavors and recipes, sometimes come across an item of such abhorrent flavor that we can't stand to finish it.

Take for instance the salad Jenny's preparing above. We eagerly prepared this recipe out of a cooking magazine, spending $15 on greens in the process. What we gained out of it was $15 in the trash and a profound sense of how much we don't like watercress, at least raw in a salad. Another example is a tofu recipe I prepared. Try as we might, we just couldn't like the flavor or texture of tofu in the dish and we scarfed it down before our taste buds could tell the difference.

Making crappy food is part of learning to cook. It's this element of exploration that makes cooking fun for me. It's a challenge to learn which flavors pair well together and which styles of food suit certain ingredients. And don't get me started about experimenting with new foods found in the market.

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." - Samuel Smiles