I burned my bread and then I ate it anyways.
In the past few weeks I have been baking my own baguettes from scratch. Long story short, what started as homemade mac and cheese turned into a surplus of all-purpose flour that I wanted to use (I’ve since upgraded to bread flour). This happened to coincide with the algorithm gods serving up a claimed 5-minute baguette recipe on YouTube. It’s a brilliant recipe that gets you close enough to an authentic baguette without all of the typical kerfuffle. That said, I dispute the 5-minute claim since it excludes the mise en place, but I digress.
Today I made the mistake of going a few degrees higher and a minute longer for baking, which resulted in the… slight char. I’m sure burnt toast, or any type of overdone food has happened to all of us, so you are probably familiar with the feeling when you first see the compromised product. I would say it is a mild form of devastation and disappointment. At least that is how I felt today. I was lucky today that my bread was not burnt enough to be inedible, and actually tasted fine for the most part, but I did notice that despite my instinctive reaction to seeing my mishap, I was able to turn things around quickly in my mind and view it as a positive. Now I better understand the physical limits while baking my bread. A few times I had undercooked, but this is the first time I overcooked, and now I have that upper bound.
Turning losses into victories is sometimes simply a matter of perception, especially when it concerns everyday life. How easy it would have been to let the audaciously crispy baguette turn my day for the worse, and perhaps on another day it would have, but I practice this type of mindset shift as much as I can. I didn’t wake up one day and say “hey, I am always going to look on the bright side of life!” NO! I tried it, failed, and failed, and failed again, over and over, and still fail, and will always fail from time to time. My bread incident was a resounding success on this front though, and I guess I want to recognize the importance of the fact that I can recognize the success (meta recognition?). I think that is part of what makes for a successful life: standing up when you get knocked down. Of course, burning bread is maybe a 2 on a 10-point scale in terms of its seriousness, but even more reason to not let it get me down.
The first step I took was to acknowledge that burning my bread sucks, followed by looking at the positives, such as what I learned from my mistake. The next step is, oddly enough, what I am doing right now. For a while I have been annoyed with myself for not writing on my blog; it’s been three or four months. I set out thinking, like many do, that I would easily make a weekly(-ish) writing habit and never run out of things to write about. While I don’t think that is an unrealistic goal, it is definitely unrealistic to think I’d achieve it instantly. Anyways, when I burnt my bread, I thought about how I hadn’t been writing as much as I wanted. And voila! With a bit of introspection, I turned my perceived loss into motivation to write!
And that’s it. I only wanted to concretize this experience and move it from my mind to written form in the hopes that someone reads it and remembers to recognize their wins, or turn their losses into wins. At the bare minimum, I’ve hardened this idea in my own mind and strengthened the part of my brain that is in charge of making these strange and helpful meta-analyses of my experiences.