Earlier this winter, Powell’s hosted an author reading and conversation with Dana Cowin, the longtime editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, and Liz Crane, the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland. For Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen, Cowin’s new cookbook, she worked alongside sixty-five of today’s greatest chefs in order to create over one hundred recipes. At the reading, I learned that each of her missteps was a lesson learned, but the real proof is in the pudding.
Here are some things I learned from the discussion, in chronological order:
Ultimately, we learned that the book was a long process, and Dana had to wait until she fell in love with a concept for the cookbook before diving in. The biggest lesson she learned from all her mistakes is that “cooking is not for the impatient,” and she feels her cookbook is about “troubleshooting before you fail.”