To Err is Human, To Post It...Divine?

I'm stuck in an internet cafe waiting out a torrential downpour, so it seemed like an ideal time to blog. I've long spouted philosophically to my friends that the world was made up of two kinds of people: those who have their kitchen garbage cans out for the world to see, and those who keep them discretely hidden beneath the sink. I've recently realized that this division runs deeper than I thought. Bloggers too, apparently, divide into those who hide their rubbish and those who put it out for the world to see. (I suppose there might also be those who never make rubbish, but I feel better if I continue on thinking those folks don't really exist).

I was recently charmed by a report on kitchen adventures gone awry by Brilynn at Jumbo Empanadas. I've been thinking for some time about her chipper approach to kitchen disaster--"all disasters can be saved by churning them into ice cream." Then later I find the Amateur Gourmet, on his virtual book tour, talking about the delights of failures past with The Girl Who Ate Everything.

Whether from noble or potentially narcissistic motivations, there are plenty of folks on the other side of the fence too. Some folks just don't believe in publicizing their mistakes. Ilva at Lucullian delights, a noteworthy (and well photographed) food blog out of Italy, believes life is too short to focus on failures. More cynically, Martha Stewart's flair for success, and perfection without flaw, has been the cause of some sincere insecurity complexes.

I've been motoring around cyberspace and generally thinking this problem over. Here's what I've decided: in my actual kitchen the garbage can is out for the world to see, and so should it be in my cyber-kitchen. I brazenly make new recipes when we have friends over for dinner, and on at least a few occasions they have been laughably terrible (a particularly pasty and tasteless pumpkin gnocchi comes to mind, with apologies to Chris and Allison Hager who suffered through it).

I believe the dignity of friends is at its greatest when we expose our vulnerabilities to each other and discover we are never so alone in our failures as it seems. Plus, I believe in an improvisational kitchen, and in such a kitchen failures can often be more powerful learning experiences than successes. So from time to time when something goes awry in my kitchen, I plan to gleefully post my follies in a sort of "postmortem" (pun intended) on whatever went wrong. Keep your eyes peeled: soon I will post the dissection of my effort to make a rolled angelfood cake with cherry brandy zabaglione.