Failure doesn’t sit right with me, which you think would make me a bit more naturally averse to cooking and especially of baking. My commitment to following a recipe precisely as written is mostly in pursuit of avoiding any whiff of failure.

When I’ve spent a lot of time on something in the kitchen only to have it flop, I see red. It makes me want to never step foot in the kitchen again. But only briefly, fortunately. I clean up (or, more often than not, John patiently cleans up while I have a momentary meltdown) the botched food and move on to a back-up plan or leave it to try again another day. No matter how much blame I may want to place on the recipe, I can usually suss out where I made a mistake.

I’ve already performed pretty poorly in 2026. As part of our Ghanaian meal, I wanted to finally attempt fufu, a popular African swallow often made of some combination of pounded yam, plantain, and cassava. The fufu was meant to serve as the delivery vessel for the nkate nkwan ne akomfem (groundnut soup with guinea fowl). Something went amiss, however, and I ended up with sticky, albeit still edible, gloop rather than tender, malleable fufu. If I had to guess the cause, I would say my green plantains were perhaps a little more brown than green, a direct result of my delay in tackling this meal.

The very next morning, I attempted a rustic Catalan bread loaf, the kind of country-style bread I’ve been looking for. Everything was going swimmingly - my measurements were spot-on, the yeast was yeasting, and it was smelling like a proper bread dough - until it was time to knead in the mixer. No matter how much I let the mixer run, the dough never seemed to develop any gluten. I couldn’t tell you what caused this failure other than that I believe bread can sense and weaponize my fear.

I’m currently reading Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors and really appreciated how she uses the word practice to describe the rather involved process of making homemade miso. Practice just sounds more positive than work or effort and puts the emphasis on the experience rather than the end result, which makes failure a bit more palatable. One of my goals for 2026 is to regard cooking as less of an achievement and more of a fulfilling practice. Kitchen failures are fine; worthwhile lessons will come from those mistakes. That probably goes for your obsession of choice, too.

Have you ever colossally failed in the kitchen? It’s a fairly regular thing for me at this point… But really, I’m pretty sure the recipe is the problem every time something goes wrong. It can’t be me!!