A Great Recipe + A Bad-Cooking Day = Disaster

Yesterday I revisited a common plight when visiting or living in another country: nothing is the same as it was at home – nothing.

If you’re a creative cook, this can make for great adventures.  If, however, you’re more like me and require a recipe road-map, this can lead to disaster – a lesson you forget at your peril.

Fortunately for me yesterday, I was cooking for a palate of one, so I can truthfully disclaim that no guests were harmed in the preparing of this dish.

What Sandra's ravioli should look like!

There is a recipe from Sandra Lee's  Semi-homemade Cooking television show that I absolutely love to make and to eat – White bean ravioli with brown butter and caper sauce.  It’s really quite good.  And to reassure you of that certainty, I refrained from taking a picture of what I managed to ‘create’ yesterday.  If you want the recipe, just click on the link above and banish all images of the below-described fiasco from your mind - this does not have to be your fate - I promise!

I had the beans I needed, but no blender or food processor, so I tried mashing them first with a fork and then with my hands.  It’s not as easy as you would think to get a bean puree by hand.  I looked at the clumpy mess I had created, reminded myself that I was dining alone, and proclaimed, Good enough!  Mistake #1.

Next I learned that no matter how finely chopped something (even something like cheese) is, finely chopped is not the same as grated.  The results are predictable, as your cheese absolutely refuses (who knew cheese was such a wilful beast?) to melt/combine/play nicely with the other ingredients.  Mistake #2.

I relearned that at some point, persistence moves from being a virtue to being its own worst-enemy kind of vice.  They didn’t have wonton wrappers at the store, so I got some fresh thin lasagne noodles instead.  But no matter how thin, unless homemade, a lasagne noodle is soooo much thicker than the wonton wrapper or the ravioli pasta that the restaurants make and use.  Thus my spooned in mixture would not be contained in the lovely triangular-shaped pasta purses I had envisioned – the dough simply broke in half when I folded it.  That’s when inspiration (translate insanity) struck: I would boil the pasta for a few quick moments to soften it up (and make it wet and slippery and impossible to work with) so that it could be folded.  Still it would not stick to itself no matter what I did.  So finally I rolled little tubes around the bean mixture, laid them in a glass pan and poured boiling water over them (this was after I kept trying to flash boil them in the water on the stove, only to have the bean mixture slide out of each little triangle, tube and other shape I tried to create).

That worked after a fashion, but what I ended up with on my plate after I had dirtied about every dish in the kitchen was fried beans with some buttered fried pasta atop them.

No worries, I thought to myself – it isn’t how a dish looks; it’s how it tastes.  Of course, I was delusional by this point, forgetting everything I have learned from the most basic of cooking shows: people eat first with their eyes.  And in this case (as is, I suspect often the case), what it looked like was a good predictor of what it would taste like.  Mistake #3

Finally, this isn’t my first kitchen disaster and it won’t be my last.  The difference a bit of age has brought to me is that I know that. So after a few bites, I resigned myself to throwing the mess away.  Maybe that’s wisdom.  Final Lesson #4




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Mistakes/Lessons
1. What you wouldn’t serve to/give/present to an honored guest, you should not serve to/give/present to yourself - for you are your own honored guest.

2. Instructions are offered by those with more knowledge than I possess for a reason.  They are usually not intended as suggestions and I ignore them at my peril.

3. Know when to quit.  Think Kenny Rogers here.



4. “Try again, fail again, fail again better.”  –Samuel Beckett, quoted by Chef Tamasin Day-Lewis in Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs , Kimberly Witherspoon & Andrew Friedman, Eds.