Eating Your Mistakes

Today’s Foodie Friday question is pretty simple: what do chocolate chip cookies and molten chocolate cake have in common (other than the chocolate)? Given today’s headline, this really shouldn’t be too difficult. Right! They were both mistakes. In the case of the cookies, the baker at the Toll House Inn was trying to make chocolate cookies and ran out of block baker’s chocolate to melt. She tried adding little pieces of sweetened chocolate she had hoping they would melt. In the latter case, Jean-Georges Vongerichten (who may or may not have actually invented it but did popularize it) was trying to bake a traditional Chocolate Torte and undercooked it. The results were, and are, fabulous. My point?
Also pretty obvious today. Sometimes we make mistakes in business that actually give us new and wonderful results. The Post-It note is the classic case but there are many others.  I suspect most of us get a little miffed when something we try doesn’t work out as expected.  Sometimes, however, if we take a step back and try to appreciate what we did get, whether it was intended or not, we can find that we’ve succeeded beyond our initial hopes.  Then again, sometimes we need to toss it and start over.  The difficulty is overcoming all the negative energy you and others might initially have towards the result and keeping an open mind.

In the various Pink Panther movies, Inspector Clouseau will exclaim “I meant to do that” or some variant after falling down, walking into a wall, or screwing something up.  Pee Wee Herman does the same, as have hundreds of others.  We can eat our mistakes from time to time.  I mean – you think Paul Prudhomme was really trying to blacken redfish or did he just turn the pan up too high?  Who cares – he tried it and it’s now a classic.  You just might be able to do the same if your first stop is the table instead of the trash.

What mistakes are you eating these days?