{"id":339,"date":"2010-04-26T19:23:31","date_gmt":"2010-04-27T00:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annakatedonovan.com\/?p=339"},"modified":"2010-04-26T19:23:31","modified_gmt":"2010-04-27T00:23:31","slug":"try-try-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/?p=339","title":{"rendered":"try try again…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, as Robert and I polished off the last of the homemade chocolate chip cookies, he complimented me on my baking prowess.\u00a0 I am not a professional baker by any means but I have mastered a handful of recipes through the years.\u00a0 I’m not always<\/em> successful in the kitchen.\u00a0 In fact, I had three recipes fail in one weekend not too long ago.\u00a0 But I try to learn from my mistakes and move on.\u00a0 My skills have<\/em> improved drastically since we first married.\u00a0 In thinking about this, I decided to share a few of my favorite failure stories. These are not necessarily in chronological order but they all occurred sometime during the first year of our marriage.<\/p>\n

Cornbread.\u00a0 My mother often makes cornbread.\u00a0 She shared her recipe with me and it is very simple.\u00a0 I had even practiced with her a few times.\u00a0 I failed to notice that the cornmeal in her recipe is self-rising.\u00a0 The cornmeal I bought was not.\u00a0 The finished product was not fluffy and light.\u00a0 It was about a quarter of an inch thick and had the consistency of a gum eraser.\u00a0 My precious new husband about chewed himself to death but he ate it anyway.\u00a0 I had a similar experience with my Dad’s biscuits…he forgot to tell me to add the shortening.\u00a0 More erasers…it took years before I tried bread again.<\/p>\n

Pork chops.\u00a0 I had another simple recipe for pan sauteed pork chops.\u00a0 You brown the pork chops on both sides and add a few ingredients to make a sauce.\u00a0 I didn’t even notice that I grabbed the soy sauce out of the refrigerator door instead of the Worcestershire.\u00a0 The pork was so salty it made our lips pucker.\u00a0 Once again Robert cleaned his plate without a word of complaint.<\/p>\n

Cake.\u00a0 The third major mishap occurred on Robert’s first birthday as a married man.\u00a0 I got out our fancy new china, silver and table linens.\u00a0 I invited our entire families and set out to make a yellow cake with chocolate icing.\u00a0 The first mistake I made was waiting until the day of the party to make anything.\u00a0 Then, I’m not sure what happened but, the cake stuck to the pan.\u00a0 And not just a little bit – it ALL stuck.\u00a0 I was flabbergasted.\u00a0 Determined not to fail, I dug the cake out of the pan and glued it together with icing and toothpicks.\u00a0 It looked great.\u00a0 I thought I had made it out of the jungle.\u00a0 That is, I thought I had made it until my new mother-in-law came to the table to help me serve the cake.\u00a0 What a disaster.\u00a0 The heaps of yellow and brown did taste good though!<\/p>\n

My sweet husband was determined not to make me feel bad.\u00a0 He ate some crap that first year.\u00a0 Twelve and a half years later, there is no more pretending.\u00a0 There is no meanness but there is no consumption of the inedible either!\u00a0 Thanks to some good cookbooks and good advice I have become a decent cook.\u00a0 Between the two of us, we fare pretty well.\u00a0 I’m also happy to report that we ate cornbread for dinner tonight – this time it was perfect!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, as Robert and I polished off the last of the homemade chocolate chip cookies, he complimented me on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[190],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","tag-baking-failures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}