How is everyone’s stress level? I feel like mine has been through the roof because of getting ready for the school year to begin. I work in higher ed, so getting ready for this unusual school year has been a little insane. Also, I have two sons who still haven’t started school yet (it was pushed back to after Labor Day), and we don’t even know for sure yet what their schooling will look like. Anyway, all of that is to say I haven’t been super focused on reading new cookbooks lately. I did pick up Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes by Bryant Terry from the library the other day. My family is attempting to cut down on our meat consumption, so I’m trying out more vegan/vegetarian cookbooks. This book is a lot of fun. Not only are Terry’s stories that go along with each recipe entertaining, but he even includes a song that goes along with each recipe. Unfortunately, many of these recipes are compound recipes (I think I just made that up :-), which require you to make one or two other recipes first in order to make the main recipe. I think it’s fine…

OK, today I’m trying something new. I call it Anatomy of a Failed Recipe. I think it’s good to admit that not every recipe we try is going to work out great, even if we have been cooking for a long time. It might be the recipe isn’t great. It might be that you are trying a new technique. It might be that you substituted ingredients that did not work out. And it might be that you didn’t have much patience, so you tried skipping a step or simplifying the recipe. The reason that this recipe didn’t work out is probably a combination of all the above. So my youngest son Logan loves gnocchi. When I saw a recipe (that looked pretty simple) for homemade gnocchi in the Cook Something cookbook, I thought this would be a good project for Logan and I to work on together. It did turn out to be fun, and it was probably a good first step on the way to successfully making gnocchi. Unfortunately, the final dish wasn’t a huge success. My husband and I still ate it, but Logan didn’t (my older son is not a fan, although he was a sport and…