I am a failure.

My older son had just come back from school, the younger one was playing with ice-cubes (throwing them off the deck onto our small unkempt grass below) and I decided in my infinite wisdom to make Pad Thai at home for the first time.  Noodles with shrimp and sauce, how hard can that be, I thought.

First, I laid out all the ingredients I thought I would need. I asked friends for recipes and then decided I would recreate this dish based on my own tastes. (Translation no cookbook author or recipe was harmed as a result of my effort).

I soaked the flat, pale noodles in a hot water, according to the package directions. I sliced scallions, rinsed and dried bean sprouts, whisked eggs, rinsed and pat-dried shrimp and finely minced cilantro. I coarsely ground some peanuts and arranged the ingredients for the sauce neatly on the counter – fish sauce, tamarind paste,  chili oil and palm sugar.

I heated my wok till it was searing hot, added the eggs, scrambled and moved them gently to the side as I added the shrimp, and tossed to cook them to perfection. Next scallions and beans, a good toss, and then the sauces and sugar went in. As a childhood habit, I never taste when I cook. It comes from the belief that I was taught as a child that the first taste of prepared food is always an offering to the Gods and tasting it defiles it. When I was growing up, we would feed the first serving to neighborhood animals, since they are said to be pure of soul. Here in the US, I say a prayer before serving the food.

Now, back to the Pad Thai, I had already rinsed the noodles in cold water and they went in next.. My first attempt at the Pad-Thai was ready. I was concerned that the color did not quite resemble the restaurant Pad-Thai but let it go. In fact, it looked like a sad brown instead of vibrant orange. But undeterred, I went on.

I shouldn’t have.

The dish tasted abysmal. No the noodles weren’t mushy, the shrimp weren’t over cooked, the eggs did not get rubbery.. none of that. The dish had no taste. We would have been better off eating a toast without butter. Even that would have tasted better . My kids, bless their heart, poured ketchup on it in an attempt to eat it. “It’s okay, Mama,” said my son, “At least you tried.”  My husband was a little more, well, honest. “This really is lacking taste, what happened?” I posted on Twitter and FB and most folks were encouraging: “at least you tried“ appeared to be the kindest response and the most fun one, “This is why God invented restaurants.” And then a few nasty ones: “How can you publicly admit to failing at a dish? You are a cookbook author! You should know better!”

Really?

As queen of kitchen disasters, and my friends and family will attest to this, I am always cooking up disasters. It is part of the program – for any good dish that comes out of my kitchen, there are several that shouldn’t have seen the light of day or the plates of loved ones. I once cooked up chocolate mousse and instead of heating the chocolate OVER a pan of water, I added it to the pan of water. I had a rock solid mousse that no one would touch. Or, ah, and this is the best bad yet: I was using a pressure cooker to make a potato curry. The cooker ran out of water, the whistle blew off its top and the entire curry spurted out through the cooker’s spout and onto the ceiling above and then some of it fell back onto the stove that had a hot, deep frying pan filled with hot oil. The entire thing caught fire and I almost burnt the house down. It happens, folks.

Failing in the kitchen, or a fear of failing, can be attributed to many things, I suppose: fear of a new cuisine, a new ingredient, fear of showing a loved one we are less than perfect or fear of creating something inedible.  We all know fear, don’t we?  Examples:  fear of being an Indian lady serving the Southwest BBQ to a hardcore meat loving crowd, fear of not really understanding how to cut the “Super Delicious and Nutritious Pomegranate” every food magazine keeps touting, fear of substituting apples for custard apples, or fear of serving the wrong wines at the wrong temperatures, or fear of letting your significant other see you are kind of inept in the kitchen (“what if he thinks the same of me in the bedroom?”). It exists and is hard to deny. Perhaps some people feel the pressure to match expectations of being a cook as great as their aunt/mother/father/sister/friend.  That can be hard, I know.  My parents are amazing cooks and I always aspire to be like them. I love, love, love my mother’s cooking and yet nothing of hers that I make tastes like what she does. I will often complain to her but she reminds me, “It has taken me 40 years to learn to cook like this.”

Or maybe we are afraid that after one bad meal (the pad thai being my 100th), we will never recover. That one bad meal will set the precedent of all meals, of all things to come.

This is why God invented the trash can. if it tastes bad, throw it away I grew up learning to respect food and the thought of wasting it was unthinkable. But most things can be salvaged with Sriracha, so the dump into the trash is infrequent in my house.

Cooking, like anything else, takes practice. While an understanding of ingredients is critical in putting together a dish, it takes trail and error too. My Pad-Thai lacked sauce, I mean totally.  But we moved on.

Failing is a necessary ingredient in cooking success.