Rookie mistakes and fish stew

The more I think about it the more I recognize the voices from my past rolling through my thoughts. Honey might call it my reticular activating system: I thought he was making that up the first time he said it out loud. One sibling taunt was the word, “Rookie!” Used in a derogatory way to indicate you didn’t know what were doing. Like striking out when you were up to bat.

I’ve had a lot of rookie mistakes in my life. As I was making chili the other night I remembered once when I tried to make Cioppino. It was a newlywed cooking disaster– Honey & I still laugh about it after 30 years. I brought the recipe home after tasting the delicious soup at an office potluck. If I had the Internet and Google in 1985 I would have looked up several recipe options, read reviews, learned from other’s mistakes. I may not have made it had I known it was fish stew. Instead I had a few scribbled notes on a yellow notepad.

Honey was golfing so I spent my whole Saturday & most of the week’s grocery budget making this soup. My notes called for 2-4 fish heads. I went to a local fish shop and got 2 huge King Salmon ones. The counter guy said that would be plenty and gave them to me for free. I also bought scallops, shrimp and crab. I stewed ’em up, those heads, all day, until the eyeballs fell out. That should have been a warning sign. It was kind of gross. OK, really gross. I strained the fish parts out and finished the recipe. (I saved the eyeballs to show Honey later; appetizing, right?)

I set the table with our wedding china, placemats, candles, everything. I was SO EXCITED for Honey to come home so we could eat. Well the soup was horrible, so fishy, like eating fish oil. I was shocked it didn’t taste like the one from work. We tried to save the seafood by straining and rinsing. We ended up ordering pizza.

So what went wrong? Well, I never once tasted the stew as it was cooking. And, turns out my co-worker used 2 little, tiny lake trout heads.  Oops.  Sometimes only those close to us see our failures. Sometimes we are publically humiliated when we make mistakes. The key is to not let our past errors define our future. It’s ok to be a rookie. We have to start somewhere, right?