Work in progress

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I can sometimes find this whole food business rather intimidating.  It is fairly obvious that there has been something of a food revolution over the past few years, with a wealth of cookbooks, cookery programmes, food blogs and food photography apps mushrooming into the public conscious.  I think that this is brilliant - clearly, as I would be a hypocrite otherwise, what with this here burble that I pretend is a food blog, and my penchant for taking pictures of food and prettifying them on Instagram.  However, I do have one concern about all this - the pursuit of perfection.

It seems to me that so many articles, programmes, how-to videos and all that jazz are all about one thing -  how to make the perfect whatever. Which I find puts really rather a lot of pressure on the would-be cook.  What if it doesn't come out perfect?  Am I a failure?  My grandmother makes amazing roast potatoes, which I adore, but this recipe says it's the 'ultimate' roast potato recipe, so does that make my previous opinion of my grandmother's potatoes wrong?  What if I don't like one of the ingredients in this 'perfect x' recipe, does that mean that if I make it without it, it will be imperfect?  Even if I prefer the taste?

Have a pootle around the world of food blogs too, and it seems as though as no-one ever has any problems.  Everything seems to have gone smoothly, no confusion, no burnt bits, no muddling up recipe stages.  And the end result is always perfect.

Am I the only one who struggles with new techniques?  Am I the only one who is willing to admit in the public sphere that sometimes you can spend hours on making something for the first time, only to end up in tears and having a boiled egg for supper instead?  (Which of course, as everyone should be able to confess, is NOT the easy thing it pretends to be and that it actually takes loads of practice to get a soft-boiled egg  with a white that isn't still viscous or a yolk that hasn't turned to powder.)

It is a well-established notion that we learn from mistakes.  Mistakes provoke chance discoveries and new creations, or at the very least, help us to form our tastes.  I am willing to admit to mine, and I hereby present a couple of my recent disasters:

Cornish pasty - look, wasn't I organised?  Didn't that bode well?

Ah, all ready to be tucked up and baked.  Shame that the swede stayed rock-hard and the pastry turned to hot dust.

My first (and only to date) attempt at making bagels.  This is after about ten minutes of kneading the dough.

A further half an hour of kneading, and it looks like I'm trying to make a model solar system.  This all went in the bin and I went to try and not cry in the shower.

There was also the memorable fish risotto I made five years ago - its over-salted, pungent hideousness still lingers in my tastebuds' memory.

So, there you have it.  I have a food blog and I am not an expert on food.  Now, I'm off to make some scrambled egg for lunch - fingers crossed that I don't overcook it and it doesn't just all end up caked to the pan.