Once, when I was trying to cook, it occurred to me that while while it is hard work to gain expertise in cooking, it must be easy to be an adequate cook. Well, obviously, but my reasoning is more interesting than the conclusion.

The recipe for the typical dish specifies the ingredients and the methods with great precision.  But the typical dish has evolved over hundreds of years through times and places that were less well-stocked than the present times.  It follows then, that the path to the present-day dish must be littered with hundreds of other variations of this dish most of which lack, or contain less of, one or more ingredients; and must have been prepared by a slightly different method because it was cooked in a time with a different technology. Which is more, all those variations must be edible, because someone indeed ate them and survived.

I think there is a moral somewhere here… perhaps realising this will help us turn a better cook, because it will relieve us of the fear of failure. Or something.