There are a few examples of how kitchen mistakes turned out to be something new and great - like brownies, rotten-cheeses and penicillin. But it's not easy to transform an error into a jackpot, and most of the times when you are trying to make a thing and something goes wrong, the results are pure crap.
When you are teenfooding, that is, when you are free to experiment and do whatever pleases you on the cooking, these mistakes are much more easy to commit. It is sad, but very important not to forget and admit that errors and failures are a very real and frequent part of the cooking activity.
Today, I woke up late and went straight to lunch-making. I ate lots of meat yesterday, so I thought today should be a vegetables-galore day (much like my sundaytime lunch below). I decided to try new vegetables, like the gilo ("Scarlet Eggplant" fruit) and the green bell pepper I've bought on the street fair last tuesday. Everything was going well, the vegetables stirred on olive oil and a little bit of cabbage and spinach already chopped to be added to the pot. Then I commited the most horrible and stupid mistake one can do when in kitchen: I accidentally oversalted it!
I tried to save it, removing all the salt I could, but I knew it was already doomed. So I did the only thing I could do: in the heat of the moment, I chopped a raw potato - as I've heard all my life that, when you put too much salt on something, all you need to do is to cook a potato with it and it would consume all the salt. That works great on something like cooked beans, but not in this case. The chopped potato cooked and melted, and any salt it could have absorbed was again loose on my vegetables.
It was very sad and awfull to eat it: instead of a dish with freshly stirred vegetables, like I wanted, I ended up with my plate full of "Over-Cooked & Salty-as-Hell Vegetable Purée of Death". Thankfully, I didn't took any photos - it looked truly horrible.
It was not my firt nor last and surely not my worst kitchen mistake (the memories from my kaki-with-shoyu red sauce still haunts me). But it makes me really sad to see that all I did was spoil ingredients and waste time. Everything seems to be worst after a mystake like this - the juice was rotten, the mango I had for dessert tasted like cardboard and some prick threw a stone on my backyard. The dishes remain unwashed as a graveyardish monument, a memento to my unability to do anything right.
But one shouldn't let the mistakes of a life put everything down. It is an unavoidable part of being truly alive, of being young, of making things happen. With time, one learns to reduce the chances of making mistakes, as well as solutions for the mistakes that eventually happen.
The important thing is to keep in mind that everything can go wrong sometimes - and that that's the beauty of it all.
MASTERPIECE!
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