Failure

Several years ago I was laying in my bed and had one of those “aha” moments, or so I thought.  I had magically been inspired to create the most awesome dessert ever.  I could picture it perfectly in my mind.  I could almost taste the sweet morsels and the tangy raspberry that would compliment it.  This desert would put all others to shame.

The next day I hurriedly went to the store to stock up on my ingredients for as the great Escoffier says ” The most skilled cook cannot attempt anything if given nothing….”.

My shopping list included the following:

• Bananas
• Fresh Raspberries
• Dark Chocolate

Sounds like a winning combination right?   Wrong…

The Dude Diving, don’t have any pics of the ravioli sorry.

So what was my brilliant idea that I failed so miserably at?  Chocolate Banana Ravioli with a Raspberry sauce (I actually got the raspberry sauce right).

I started by mixing the basic pasta dough together, a little flour, salt  and egg to stick it all together.  Then I mixed in cocoa powder and sugar to sweeten.  I got the dough finally to a decent taste (I could never give it a really good chocolaty taste though).

I rolled it out and put my sliced bananas inside.  Then I pressed the top dough layer on and creased the ravioli with a fork.  All was well and I was confident in the success of my project.

Then things started to go awry, I dropped the ravioli in my boiling water where many of them promptly ruptured, apparently the cocoa had made my dough to dry to bind together.  The ones that didn’t blow up I prepared for eating.

At last my moment of triumph had come.  I had a bowl of my ravioli (although they were very ugly) with raspberry sauce on them.  I picked up with my fork and took the first bite, I think it lasted 5 seconds in my mouth before I had to be like Gaston and be “especially good at expectorating” (my what a guy, Gaston!!!).

The dough tasted like a piece of cardboard that had been sprinkled with cocoa powder, the bananas tasted rotten and where total mush.  The raspberry sauce was really good though.  So I tossed the ravioli and settled for some vanilla ice cream and raspberry sauce.

One of my favorite places ever, a market in Bruges, Belgium

What is the moral of the story?

Well I find two.  First, I failed miserably at cooking something I had dreamed up, but I didn’t give up dreaming up new things nor did I give up cooking.  In fact almost all of my favorite recipes I cook came after this experience.  It taught me to be more methodical in my approach to cooking.  That is, now I research what I want to make quite extensively before I begin developing a recipe (okay so I don’t write a dissertation on them or anything) .

The second moral is there is always silver lining.  The raspberry sauce that I made for that disastrous meal was my silver lining.  In fact I used that recipe for some time when ever I would make raspberry sauce, so although the meal failed I was able to get some good from it still.

At the risk of being philosophical, isn’t life like that.  If we give up on something we fail at we miss out on future successes that dwarf the failure.  Also if we look closely at our failures, typically we will find a silver lining, something we learned or garnered from the experience that we will carry with us to make us better in the future.

I hope we all remember our failures so we can be a little better for them.