The editor of Food & Wine magazine owns up: "I am going to be honest: I am not a great cook."
Early in the book "Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen," author Dana Cowin acknowledges that she's "messed up literally every type of food."
But there's no cooking conundrum that can't be made at least a little more manageable, especially with the help of top chefs such as Mario Batali, Jacques Pepin, Alice Waters and Thomas Keller, who wrote the introduction.
"Mastering My Mistakes"looks useful and entertaining, and is getting great reviews. But when Nancy Leson and I discussed it on this week's Food for Thought what we wanted to know about were each other's mistakes.
Nancy quoted Tom Douglas as saying, "It's not so much about admitting our mistakes; it's about learning from them." Nancy confessed that she once mistook salt for sugar and sprinkled it on an open-faced apple pie she'd just baked. What did she learn from that? "Label your jars," she said.
For my part, I admitted that I had not thought my live, Komodo dragon brain-eating party all the way through. Cleanup turned out to be a much bigger job than I'd expected. My takeaway? Stick to those little dough-wrapped cocktail franks.
It's always fun to hear about someone else's kitchen disasters. Care to contribute?
"...the brave soul can mend even disaster."
– Catherine the Great
