“I had been cooking about four years, all very high end. French food. Worked in Switzerland. Traveled around Europe. I was very full of myself. Then, at my first chef job (acquired by default) on the East coast near Chesapeake Bay, I’m showing off to a very attractive young woman who wanted to work in the kitchen. I’m making Zabaglione. She was Italian but had never had it. I think, “I’m a shoo in, right?†I’m whipping the crap out of it, and it’s going nowhere. I pronounce it finished and we taste. Yikes. I used salt instead of sugar. (In the end, she married my friend, and I moved to California.)–Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
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Libby Hawkins / Class & Event Facilitator and Kitchen Shop Gadget Guru
“My parents came to visit me in my first apartment in Houston, where I was finishing school. I wanted to fix a really special dinner. I made Beef Stroganoff, which turned out to be the consistency of concrete. “Wow, this sure is filling,” said my mother, who was a fabulous cook.
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“Success is not a good teacher. Failure makes you humble” – Shah Rukh Khan
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Kim Stewart / Class Facilitator (and CCKC Pro Series graduate)
“There have been a few! There was a granulated vs confectioners sugar mix-up, a hilarious search of a friend’s kitchen cupboards looking for the “Omit Soda” mentioned in a Betty Crocker cookbook, a vague recollection of very crunchy broccoli, and a more vivid memory of confusion between a clove and a head of garlic.â€
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“Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes, and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you’ve got something to share.” – Steve Harvey
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Annette Elliott / Bean Counter
“I bake every Christmas to give gifts to friends and family. And I used to make fudge every year >> No Fail Fudge, it’s called in the recipe. But one year, I failed with that fudge THREE times. To this day I have no idea why it failed, but there was no fudge on the cookie plates from then on…. I still resent that the No-Fail Fudge failed me!â€
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“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell
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“I have two, actually, although I had help with the second one.
Mom was out of town for a couple of days, so it was Dad, me, my two younger brothers, and my preschool sister holding down the fort. Being the oldest (all of 14 or 15), I “won†cooking duty. Things actually went fairly well. Feeling rather confident, I decided a dessert would be nice with dinner one evening. But what to make? Hmm, gingerbread seemed fairly easy and I knew we all liked it. So, ingredients were brought out, the oven was preheated, the pan prepared, and the batter mixed. Everything went into the oven without a hitch and the timer was set for the recommended time. When the timer sounded, I pulled the gingerbread out of the oven. Oddly, it didn’t appear to have gotten any bigger while it baked. As a matter of fact, it looked quite flat. Not knowing what else to do, I left it to cool. Dinner went well, and everyone was looking forward to having gingerbread, having smelled the molasses and spices while it baked. I began to slice it. More accurately, I attempted to slice it. It had a strange rubbery texture that made it hard to penetrate with the knife blade. I persevered. After extracting the first piece and depositing it on a plate, we all stared at it. It was a thin slab of gingerbread leather. There were no bubbles to be seen anywhere in it, just a uniform dark mass. Apparently I had left out the soda. After one or two attempts at chewing a bite, we decided that we could get along just fine without gingerbread for dessert that evening. “Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill
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My sister, Linda, and I were making brownies when we were kids. Mom had given us the okey-doke to do it without her. We were probably in 4th & 5th grade, I think. Let’s just say that the cooking tip I took away from that brownie-making was this…. Cocoa is NOT, in fact, an abbreviation for COCONUT, so you can’t just replace it with that in the recipe. Yep, those white brownies were a big ‘ol FAIL. But a cooking lesson was learned. So, it’s all good.â€~~~ ♦ ~~~
