That tastes...different.

Have you ever eaten a meal that was simply delicious, but when you find out what it contains, you wish you hadn’t eaten so much of it? I’m not talking about the meal containing gross ingredients. I’m talking about it having way too much of something for your liking. Too much fat, too much sodium, too many carbs, maybe even too much protein. Hopefully at that point, you realize that if you want to know what goes in your food before you eat it, you’ll need to cook it yourself - at least if you want to avoid offending people by always asking them what’s in the meal.

So you start cooking more. For a lot of us, the more time we spend in the kitchen, the more we think something like, “there has to be a way to make this healthier and still enjoyable”. So we start to experiment. We pull recipes off the internet and out of cookbooks. We swap ingredients for cleaner substitutes, and we end up with something that mimics our favorite dish. Unfortunately, a lot of us end of with something that doesn’t match up with our expectations. Either the taste is off, the texture doesn’t seem quite right, or both, so we call it a failure.

I encourage you to pause right there and think about a few questions. Did your creation taste bad or did it just not match the food you wanted? If it just wasn’t a match, would it be a good meal in general? Do you think it would be better paired with a different food item? This past weekend I tried to make homemade spaghetti sauce, and ended up with really good Sloppy Joe filling. And it was healthy. Well, the bread could have been better, but you get the point. It wasn’t what I had planned, but it worked really well. And now I know what do if I want Sloppy Joes. Don’t throw out your recipes because they didn’t go according to plan. See if they just need to be tweaked or paired with a different food. Or maybe you just need to change your expectation. You still have a healthy meal that tastes good, and that was the real goal.