Today’s life lesson is simple but essential: keep going. Keep going even when things aren’t working out, when your carefully laid plans have imploded, when you feel like an abject failure at pretty much everything. I’m pretending this is a post about how you should keep cooking even when recipes aren’t turning out right, and it is, but it’s also just a reminder that in life you can either crumple to the ground in a heap, or you can keep going.

These breadsticks look pretty, but they posed a major risk to dental work.

There exists a perception that professional chefs cook everything perfectly all the time, and I’m here to tell you that this couldn’t be further from the truth. I go through phases where it honestly seems as though nothing in the kitchen works properly. Recipes that should work don’t, recipes that I’ve made hundreds of times without fail suddenly turn out poorly, and nothing tastes right. It would be easy to just storm out of the kitchen.

This probably boiled over mere seconds after the shot was taken.

Recently, for example, I’ve made three different breadstick recipes with lousy results all three times. I overfed my treasured sourdough starter with whole-wheat flour and increased the acidity so much that it’s like a biological weapon is lurking in my sunroom. In an attempt to use up my pantry stores, I made a Key lime and ginger tart that didn’t set at all, even after six hours in the refrigerator. It tasted delicious, but the presentation was appalling. (There are no photos of this event.)

Trying to salvage overproofed pizza dough left over from bread class…

But these occasions are precisely the times when you just have to keep going. When you have to work harder to figure out exactly what went wrong, and how you can improve it next time. When you have to acknowledge that not every single thing you cook will be perfect every time, but trust that the learning is in the process. It’s why I recommend keeping a kitchen journal and taking notes on just about every single recipe you make.

…and it actually worked!

We live in an age of immediate gratification. We expect things to happen instantaneously and perfectly, and we no longer know how to fail. This is an especially challenging concept for home cooks, especially people who come to cooking later on in life. Those of us who started cooking young – with this recipe, most likely – remember mistaking a tablespoon for a teaspoon and producing salty, inedible cookies. We laugh about it now and count it as a learning experience. Yet if we made that same mistake as adults, we’d castigate ourselves for our stupidity and perhaps give up on baking altogether, because we didn’t get it right the first time.

In cooking, as with just about every worthwhile skill, the devil is in the countless hours of practice. No one starts out as a brilliant chef, just as athletes don’t start out as Olympians. When you’re just beginning in the kitchen, you might be disappointed with the results, but it’s imperative that you keep going. You will learn how to season, how to adjust recipes, how to trust your own palate. You will learn how to prepare food that you like and you’ll gain confidence every single time you cook. You will get better. But in order to do that, you have to keep cooking – and that’s tough, especially when perhaps your efforts aren’t received with enthusiasm by your household. (And if that’s the case? Invite your family into the kitchen and make meal preparation a household activity, so that everyone can share in both the effort and the result.)

A very simple tofu and bok choy stir-fry with brown rice…and one of my favorite things I’ve cooked recently.

So please, friends, don’t give up. Don’t get weighed down with disappointment over kitchen experiments that aren’t a roaring success. Keep going. Try something new, fail well, make notes about it and get up and do it again. And above all else, please keep cooking.

P.S. I wrote a guest blog on this very topic over at Healthy Baby Fit Mom! Read more here!

P.P.S. Read a brilliant post about the concept of “constructive growth” and being a “tenacious loser” here; thanks to Karen for sending this link!