successes and failures

The other day I had a friend say to me "I tried your such and such recipe, but it didn't look nearly as nice as yours did". I asked her how it tasted, and she said delicious. I reassured her that although I do try to make my food look pretty, it doesn't always work, and well to be honest the most important part of food is the taste. Right?

Even when making my food, I try my best to make the food look presentable, but sometimes it just doesn't. Sometimes I have to take pictures from different angles, or zoom in on the food so you can only see certain parts of it. But it usually still tastes wonderful, regardless of what it looks like.

And please also know that I too have my fair share of cooking disasters. And I don't share every recipe with you that I make. I have made many dishes that we only ate because we were too hungry not to.

I am NOT a cooking expert. Yes, I love to make food, I love to try new recipes, I love to change recipes around and make them my own. But I never went to cooking school. I'm not a chef in a fancy restaurant. I think my food tastes good, and I hope you do to. But you might know how to do something better than I do. You might know a better spice option on a recipe, or how to make steps of the recipe simpler.

And I want to learn these things too. So please, please, please share your ideas with me. Tell me how YOU make a certain food, and what you do to make this (or that) recipe better and easier and healthier too.

I want to hear about your successes and your failures.

So, lets make a deal:

You share a short cut to cooking with me, and I'll share one of mine with you.
You share one of your cooking failures with me, and I'll tell you about one of mine.

Sound like a good idea? We can learn from each other. We can laugh with each other over our mistakes. And we can teach one another how to improve our cooking, one step at a time.