These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 4: Cuisine – Feeling Good.

Series 4: Cuisine – Feeling Food

Week 61: Mistakes in the Kitchen

• Whether the mistake was a result of negligence or completely inadvertent, the tension and breakdown will not help you. Take a deep breath and calm down even if it seems to you that you cannot do anything. In fact, you can always do something to correct the mistake or at least improve the situation and come out with the least losses in the served dish.

• A good chef’s ingenuity lies in his or her ability to correct mistakes no matter in any dish, even after it has been prepared. For a simple example, everyone can add the missing salt to the dish, but it is more difficult to deal with the excess salt.

• Do not rush to name it a mistake before you think carefully about the possibility of using it to modify or improve the dish you are preparing and come out with a freshly created recipe.

• A mistake only becomes a problem when it is repeated over and over. Even then, you don’t have to stop working but rather think seriously about how to get past your repeated mistakes.

• Fear of being wrong makes you wrong. If you think a lot about how to avoid mistakes, you probably need a short break to catch your breath and return to work with a new spirit.

• Both a novice cook and a professional chef can make mistakes during cooking. But the mistakes of a professional chef should not appear in the dish when it is served, as his or her skills and experience should be manifested on the prompt attention to mistakes and quickly correct them during the cooking process.

• Anxiety and rush are two main causes of cooking mistakes. What is the use of anxiety and rush? Leave them outside the kitchen threshold without thinking.

• Your mistakes should not be a source of undermining your self-confidence in any way. Look directly for the cause of the mistake, not to justify to others, but to be able to best address it and avoid it in the future.

• Focus is the magic word for avoiding cooking mistakes.

• Take mistakes as a challenge and the way you treat them as an art.

• Your understanding that mistakes are an essential part of work and your prior readiness to deal with mistakes keep them away from you at work and make you more confident.