Recipe Ruined: A Tale of Mistake Makers

Having children is always such a great reminder that making mistakes is all part of life. My daughter Sunny loves to bake and create in the kitchen. Cold and rainy days are a special inspiration for her to get in the kitchen with some butter and sugar. (She is my spirit animal, for sure.)

Last week she did just this, pulling out a favorite family recipe for chocolate chip cookies. This recipe has been floating around our family for decades and the version she was looking at was kind of tricky to read.

She started the process of assembling ingredients and combined the flour and sugar together first. This was wrong. The flour is supposed to go last and when she asked for my help, the deed was already done. In the midst of me trying to explain how we might be able to solve the problem, she began to cry.

“Oh mom. Now they’re ruined! I know you don’t like me to start over on more cookies, so now what?” She let it flow. Real tears ran down her cheeks, matching the cold water streaking down the windows across the room.

And she’s right, I don’t let her throw everything out and start again on recipes. Whether that’s right or wrong, it was just something I decided to do when she was in the kitchen more and more and most times she adjusts and is fine. But my little baker was so upset. Maybe it was because she was already punting with baking these cookies with only brown sugar because we were out of white. I’m not sure, but whatever the reason, I had one unhappy nine year old.

It was a perfect opportunity to talk about flexibility and experimentation and rolling with the punches and all those other cliched phrases and ways of living we sometimes repeat with rote. But in this moment, I stayed with her and talked through alternatives of what to do and tried to lighten her mood by reminding her that anything made with sugar and butter ends tasting wonderful, even if it doesn’t look exactly right.

I stayed with her and molded tiny balls of dough onto a cookie sheet and waited the nine minutes to see how our first batch would turn out.

“Oh, mom! They look fine!” A pause, quiet eye contact and a smile signifying that we both wanted to taste one, a final inspection of our adapted cookie recipe.

“And they taste fine too!” She exclaimed.

Cookie success.

How many times, still, am I in my kitchen of life crying over the fact that I put in ingredients in the wrong order? Messed up somehow? Made a mistake on top of another already modified adaptation and all felt helpless? This happens to me too. So walking my daughter through a very real situation of hurt and loss reminded me that I need and appreciate that too.

So I’m going to stop apologizing to friends who listen to me unload about a hard and personal time. Less apologizing and more gratitude. I will proudly applaud and cheer the use of therapy for anyone trying to navigate a treacherous section of life. Because we all need people to stay in our kitchens with us, waiting to see how that first batch of cookies will turn out.

What’s going on in your kitchen this week? Sending love to all the mistake makers and recipe changers!