Before I get started sharing tips or recipes, I want to share some cooking experiences with you - some bad ones.
I used to be afraid of cooking because I thought it was hard and that I would screw things up. In truth, it’s not that easy to royally mess up a dish (if you’re not baking, anyway), and if you make a mistake it will most likely turn out OK anyway. Offhand, I can only think of a handful of truly noteworthy mistakes I made when I was new to cooking.
I’m sharing them because I learned from them, and they made me less afraid and a better cook. When I look back, I can’t believe I made them, but I also couldn’t have imagined then that I would be cooking dinner every night like I do now.
So here, in no particular order, are my biggest culinary blunders:
1. I was making this recipe and misread something important: Putting tortilla strips in the oven for a couple of minutes, not tortilla chips. When I looked away for a moment, there was a fire in my oven. In the end, I threw them out and the smoke alarm never went off. And I learned to never bake a tortilla chip again.
2. On Christmas Eve, I served my wife and my brother a quinoa side dish. I ignored the directions of baking a head of garlic ahead of time (after all, it took an extra hour), and instead put in several cloves of raw garlic. Apparently I didn’t understand the potency. I do now. I think a poinsettia I breathed near died that night.
3. Everyone who knows me well knows that I love to make homemade pizza, and I also enjoy cooking it on the grill. The first time I tried it on a charcoal grill the crust fell completely apart, as evidenced by this picture. So, I started over and it was fine (see the picture at the bottom of this post). I learned good temperature control and now I prefer to cook pizza on a gas grill because it’s so much easier to manage.
4. Any cook will tell you not to over-salt anything. You can always add salt later, but you can’t take salt away. I learned that the hard way while making a beef stew. I don’t know if I was absent-minded that evening, or worried that the stew would be horribly bland, but when we sat down to eat dinner it tasted as if the Salt Fairy had had a major accident in my Dutch oven. Lesson learned; I am now extremely cautious when salting throughout the cooking process, and I taste test often.
5. Note to self: When making stuffed peppers, don’t chop up the peppers. Sounds pretty basic, right? I’d learned that a good way to cut up bell peppers is to chop both ends off, then cut out the center, then dice the big strips that are left. This became so automatic that I cut the ends off peppers for a stuffed pepper recipe and had to drive to the grocery store to get additional peppers that hadn’t been decapitated. I’ve tried since then not to so easily go on auto-pilot.
So, there you go. A few big mistakes, but everything turned out OK in the end. Just try to remember that making a major blunder doesn’t always kill a meal. You’ll be a better cook for it.
I used to be afraid of cooking because I thought it was hard and that I would screw things up. In truth, it’s not that easy to royally mess up a dish (if you’re not baking, anyway), and if you make a mistake it will most likely turn out OK anyway. Offhand, I can only think of a handful of truly noteworthy mistakes I made when I was new to cooking.
I’m sharing them because I learned from them, and they made me less afraid and a better cook. When I look back, I can’t believe I made them, but I also couldn’t have imagined then that I would be cooking dinner every night like I do now.
So here, in no particular order, are my biggest culinary blunders:
1. I was making this recipe and misread something important: Putting tortilla strips in the oven for a couple of minutes, not tortilla chips. When I looked away for a moment, there was a fire in my oven. In the end, I threw them out and the smoke alarm never went off. And I learned to never bake a tortilla chip again.
2. On Christmas Eve, I served my wife and my brother a quinoa side dish. I ignored the directions of baking a head of garlic ahead of time (after all, it took an extra hour), and instead put in several cloves of raw garlic. Apparently I didn’t understand the potency. I do now. I think a poinsettia I breathed near died that night.
3. Everyone who knows me well knows that I love to make homemade pizza, and I also enjoy cooking it on the grill. The first time I tried it on a charcoal grill the crust fell completely apart, as evidenced by this picture. So, I started over and it was fine (see the picture at the bottom of this post). I learned good temperature control and now I prefer to cook pizza on a gas grill because it’s so much easier to manage.
4. Any cook will tell you not to over-salt anything. You can always add salt later, but you can’t take salt away. I learned that the hard way while making a beef stew. I don’t know if I was absent-minded that evening, or worried that the stew would be horribly bland, but when we sat down to eat dinner it tasted as if the Salt Fairy had had a major accident in my Dutch oven. Lesson learned; I am now extremely cautious when salting throughout the cooking process, and I taste test often.
5. Note to self: When making stuffed peppers, don’t chop up the peppers. Sounds pretty basic, right? I’d learned that a good way to cut up bell peppers is to chop both ends off, then cut out the center, then dice the big strips that are left. This became so automatic that I cut the ends off peppers for a stuffed pepper recipe and had to drive to the grocery store to get additional peppers that hadn’t been decapitated. I’ve tried since then not to so easily go on auto-pilot.
So, there you go. A few big mistakes, but everything turned out OK in the end. Just try to remember that making a major blunder doesn’t always kill a meal. You’ll be a better cook for it.
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