OOPS!

You hear people saying things like "So and so is a good cook, I'm so jealous. I can't cook." If you probe a little further, as I sometimes do, you frequently find out that the person who "can't cook," had a bad experience with a recipe, or a dish turned out wrong, or didn't turn out the way s/he thought it should, and thus, by definition, they can't cook.

My friend Andrew told me some time ago about trying to make pancakes, and how they tasted good, but "they just didn't get brown on one side. What did I do wrong?"

What makes someone think they did something wrong? I try to stress in these blogs that there are so many things that are involved in putting a dish together, that a recipe can only guide you so far. Unfortunately, we get trained, so early, to "FOLLOW DIRECTIONS." So if the recipe says "bake in a 350 degree oven for twenty minutes," that's what we do. Well, what if the oven's thermostat was off? It happens more than you might think. What if the recipe writer were working on a dry day, and it's raining when you cook? Well, your ingredients are going to have more water in them, and it will take longer to cook them. It happens more than you think. Or - one of my favorite examples - what if the recipe says "use apples that are somewhat tart," and you have a taste for things that are sour? Your idea of what is "somewhat tart" is going to be different from what someone who likes sweet apples considers a "somewhat tart" one, and the two of you, making the same dessert, will get different results. Which one is correct? Both of them.

So, there are two lessons here, and then a story. First, is the one I've been stressing: don't treat recipes as the "be all and end all" of cooking. Second, don't be so hard on yourself if it doesn't work the way you thought it was supposed to. Your result may very well be the correct one.

There's an excellent analogy drawn in an essay by Daniel Patterson. He talks about how you might have directions to "drive west for five minutes." Well, what if you run into red lights? Or what if there's a bump that slows you down? Or what if the speed you think you're going at is wrong? Does that make you a bad driver? Of course not.

And as Mr. Patterson observes in his essay "Good cooks make mistakes all the time. They take wrong turns and end up in strange places. Their attention sharpens as they try to figure out where they are and how they got there. Eventually they either reach their original destination or discover that wherever they stumbled into is really the best place to be. Sometimes it's important to get lost."

Amen to that. I think of myself as a good cook. So do a lot of people. But I make mistakes. I make a LOT of mistakes. At thanksgiving, I made a BIG one. I was trying to make some kind of gratin with white potatoes, and chard, but instead of using milk, I used chicken stock. I knew that chicken stock doesn't have the thickening agents that milk does, but I figured that the starch in the potatoes would bind the dish together.


WRONG!!! And in retrospect, what in the name of Buddha was I doing? Yes, there ARE baked casseroles based on broth, called "panades," but they all involve lots of bread to sop up the stuff. So, after an hour of baking, I had a very wet casserole dish filled with lovely slices of potato that had been cooked in chicken stock for so long that they had taken on wonderful flavor, and some very soft, but still vibrant, chard. What I did NOT have was a gratin. What to do?

I fished out the potatoes, and the greens, and I reserved the stock (that would make a good soup later on). Then I piled everything into a baking dish, covered it with bread crumbs and butter, and broiled it for five minutes. INSTANT SUCCESS. And a few days later, the leftovers, blended with an egg, some broccoli, and a little salt, made superb potato "pancakes" alongside of a plate of tuna steak.

You're going to make mistakes. We all will. I won't make a casserole in that fashion again (although I WILL review recipes on panades and my next one will work), but now, I have a new recipe for a baked potato casserole. Maybe when I make it again, I'll cook the potatoes in the stock on the stove, rather than bake it for an hour, but then again, maybe for old times sake, I'll do it the way I did the first time.

NOT!