Write On: Kitchen Confidential

Photo by Amy Shutt from this Dining In recipe.

Lately, I can’t stop watching Top Chef.

I love getting to know the chefs and predicting who will go home each episode. I love learning about new ingredients and hearing criticisms from people like Anthony Bourdain and Daniel Boulud.

But what I love most is watching chefs who screw up get a second chance to bounce back with a redemptive dish.

The show has inspired me to do something I’m usually afraid to do: get in the kitchen.

I love food, but I have always struggled with cooking. I remember being an over-confident 10-year-old, thinking I could make my own chocolate cake to impress my grandma when she was visiting. But I didn’t know how to use an electric mixer properly, and my chocolate cake batter ended up all over the kitchen walls.

In college, I borrowed my roommate’s cookware while she was out of town to make boxed beef stroganoff. I ended up burning the pasta into the pot and spending the rest of the weekend in a panic, trying to figure out how to clean it before she got home. (Baking soda and hours of scrubbing finally did the trick.)

These spectacular failures continued into my adult years, and each one squashed my desire to cook anything ambitious. I’m just bad at cooking, I’d think—that’s just the way it is.

But lately, I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

One of my favorite people I’ve ever interviewed is Dana Cowin, the editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine. When researching her, I was so surprised to learn that she got the top job at the top food magazine 20 years ago with little knowledge about food. In fact, for years she had a column in which she had another editor help her correct her cooking mistakes. But she wrote the column under a pseudonym, too embarrassed to publicly reveal her struggles.

After two decades of working with the country’s top chefs, Cowin became more open. Last year, she released a recipe book called Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen. In it, she recounts lessons she’s learned from working with great chefs such as Eric Ripert and Tom Colicchio.

I’ve learned from Cowin and Top Chef, too. Cooking is an art, yes, and it’s not something I’ll ever be a natural at. I’ll never be able to win a blind taste-test of rare spices or dice an onion with the incredible speed and precision of season three winner Hung Huynh.

What I can do, though, is get better with practice.

One of my favorite food bloggers is self-taught. She purchased a classic recipe book and cooked her way through it. Once she had mastered the basics, she got more inventive.

I’ve been thinking about doing that, or even trying some of the recipes we publish in 225’s monthly “Dining In” column. Writers Tracey Koch and Stephanie Riegel make recipes for dark chocolate mousse and spicy Asian lettuce wraps look both delicious and approachable. I also recently tried 225 Dine blogger Maggie Heyn Richardson’s recipe for raw tomato pasta, and it turned out really, really good.

But when I attempted the recipe a second time, I measured my ingredients incorrectly and the pasta sauce was watery. I was upset at first, but I got over it this time.

My cooking might not be perfect on the first, second or even third try. And now I know that’s OK.

Even top chefs have bad days.