Forget the Mistake. Remember the Lesson.
This mantra is apt for my adventures in the kitchen. Given the fact my mom was a good cook and did all of the cooking, it’s surprising I made my way into the kitchen and discovered a love for it. The fact I cook is shocking given my ineptitude about turning on a dishwasher, washing machine, or vacuum cleaner. (No, I’m not exaggerating about any of this) After over 30 years cooking, I’ve made my share of mistakes. It’s the moments when I’ve burned or over seasoned something that the lessons from ruining the dish teaches me some invaluable lesson I will remember the next time I’m standing in front of the stove.
Probably as a result of my ADD, I am one who obsesses about learning to cook a dish. There was the year I spent making Korean dumplings where each mistake became another lesson to remember for the next attempt. Cooking a duck required another year of mistakes and lessons learned. I won’t elaborate you on the machinations of trying to dry the duck to get the perfect crisp skin. Recently I spent a great deal of time learning to make dumplings using rice paper instead of dough. The challenge was the rice paper itself and then cooking the misshapen dumplings to get the skin crispy.
As someone who dabbles with many different cuisines, shopping for ingredients used to resemble an Olympic event. Even ten years ago buying Korean spices and foods required a trip to a Korean market. Now with Trader Joe’s putting out a new Korean food item monthly, a trip to H Mart may or may not be necessary. However, call me a purist or snob, but no matter how many Korean ingredients are now sold at Trader Joe’s under their banner, I still go to H Mart. I’ll admit curiosity compelled me to buy kimchi from Whole Foods. Let me just say, curiosity killed the cat in that instance. Let’s chalk that purchase up to a mistake where the lesson would be hard to forget. I won’t start on the new trend of frozen kimbap is sold at Trader Joe’s and Costco. No matter how many reels I watch where people wax rhapsodic about it, no one can convince me that the frozen kimbap is edible much less tasty. That is a mistake I won’t make since I can’t imagine what lesson I would learn from it.