Failure is (sometimes) an Option

It happens.
Failure, that is. I know. It shocks me, too, being reminded that I am, in fact, not perfect. But that's one of the harsh realities of kitchen experimentation. Sometimes things blow up in your face (though usually not literally, unless one is being very careless with heating sources). Fortunately, with food, one merely needs to secret away one's failures into a garbage bag and no one ever need know.
Unless you write a cooking blog. In that case the three people who have any interest in your food will know. But surely they won't tell anyone, right?
I was in a mood for peanut butter, which is rather like saying I was in a mood for breathing. But having just had PB&J for lunch, I didn't feel it necessary to repeat that for dinner. Well, why not a peanut sauce then, and bake tofu with said peanut sauce. It's peanut butter, but with a veneer of healthiness, unlike my aforementioned lunch. Never having made a peanut sauce, I did what any self-respecting cook would do: I Googled it.
That led me, as most recipe searches do, to Allrecipes.com, a mostly useful site that has produced some excellent results in the past. Now, I know about as much about making a peanut sauce as I do about the price of peas in Prague (it has peanut butter in it!), so I browsed a few and picked one that a) I already had all the ingredients to and b) didn't use fish sauce in the making of it.
And there you have it. I was led astray! I followed a recipe and it turned out terribly. . .
Except for those changes I made to the recipe. That might have ruined it. I don't remember the changes exactly-no doubt repressing the memory of my own bad decisions- but they definitely did not lead to a kitchen win. But, while the food was a loss and ended up in the trash, I did learn a lesson that sometimes it might be useful to follow a recipe exactly. Especially if it's a recipe I'm unfamiliar with.
Who knew?