Having people over for dinner and then serving them the very worst of your cooking is, well, pretty awful.
You wanted to do something nice, and you’ve ended up putting them, and yourself, through a grueling ordeal.
They have to eat the food, and you have to watch them picking at it reluctantly.
A friend recently invited me round for dinner. He skewered the chicken to check the juices were running clear and called over “What does it mean if no juice comes out?”
“It means it’s fucked”, his girlfriend called back.
She had a point.
A lot of people conclude at this stage that cooking just isn’t their thing. It’s too embarrassing and stressful when things go wrong.
But putting the dish on the table isn’t the end of the process, it’s just one more round of practice, and there will be many more.
The bigger and better our screw-ups, the more powerful the learning experience.
So embrace your disasters. It’s all part of the process.