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stella40 -> RE: Learning From Failure (6/2/2007 12:54:26 AM)
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Experiencing failure? Yes, of course.
You have Roadrunner, and the Coyote on the Looney Tunes cartoon. Well I'm often convinced that the Coyote is my own twin brother.
I have failed at lots of things, some spectacularly, and learned.
One such particular area is my own passion and hobby of cooking and baking.
A friend still has a dent in his kitchen ceiling from 1984 when staying at his flat I decided to heat a can of beans in a pan of boiling water. Then the phone rang. The phone call was interrupted by a very loud bang and the familiar 'crash' sound of breaking glass. Guess who forgot to open the can of beans? The can somehow exploded, hit the ceiling, bounced off a cupboard and went right through the kitchen window.
I've also learned the hard way that throwing several bags of popping corn into an open chip pan is not the best way to prepare popcorn. On a few occasions I've baked loaves of bread which would not come out of the tin. I have even managed to bake some cookies which remained permanently on the baking tray - despite efforts with spatulas, various knives, a hammer and chisel, a power drill and WD40.
However contrary to what it might appear I am a very good cook, self-taught, and some people are impressed when I tell them I learned to cook the T & E way (trial and error), I experiment, cooking for me is relaxing, an art form and over the years I have built up a repertoire of about twenty five different curries - Indian, Thai, Chinese, Korean, I have six different ways to do a spaghetti bolognaise including my secret recipe which includes Hungarian red wine, wild mushrooms and lean beef mince, I can do a lethal kimchee, quite a number of Chinese and Korean dishes, about 30 different salads. But this isn't without mistakes. I still cringe when friends remind me of the time I served them a stir fry to which I somehow added washing up liquid.
I'm persevering with home baking, but there's no middle ground, I can be either brilliant or a total disaster. People love my oatmeal cookies, oatcakes, I can do traditional Scottish shortbread and a very solid Christmas cake. But I've also baked home made brownies without any oil.
Some things are still beyond me - pancakes, and cooking rice. I tend to burn it, well 3 times out of every four. Pasta? Yes, al dente every time, potatoes yes, but rice? Perseverance. It once made me unpopular when I worked at a Polish university and lived in an apartment in a large student dorm. I kept trying but sometimes the fire alarms would go off and the building would be evacuated. The student dorm had ten floors and I guess about several hundred students and university staff lived there. I had to give up cooking rice when the local fire brigade wrote to the manager of the student dorm asking him to ask me to stop cooking rice.
But I keep trying and persevering.. because I want to learn Japanese cooking.
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