Fail-safe Method to Cooking Great Meals the First Time!

If you are anything like me, your meals usually fall flat the first time you make a new recipe. Something always seems to go wrong, doesn't it? You forget an important ingredient, or you misread the steps. You always say - next time I will do this, and that, and this, and the recipe will be perfect. But what if you want the recipe to come out perfect THIS TIME? What if you don't have the time to screw up? I've finally learned how to make a new recipe and make it taste great the FIRST TIME I make it. Follow my tips and you can too :) For all examples below, I will refer to cake, just because of my most recent experience... but you can use these tips for any recipe!

Picking the recipe - and being realistic
Normally I have to make a recipe for the following day. So, for example, if I need a cake on Thursday, I plan to make it on Wed night. The first problem I used to have was that I would pick recipes that I could not possibly complete in the time constraints I had. I work til 5 so I can't even begin to cook until after 5:30. If I picked a recipe that takes 4 hours to prepare, well you can guess I'm going to wear myself out before the end of the night and have a very hard time completing the recipe for the next day.

Don't ever settle on a recipe without first reading all the steps and making sure you can actually make it in the time limits, or kitchen limits, or whatever, you may be dealing with!

Research Obscure Ingredients
My last recipe called for Orange Zest - which after some research I learned was grated Orange Peel. I won't make any recipe without first making sure I know what all the ingredients are AND I know I can buy them. Ask your mom, your friends, your Internet, anyone! Don't go into a recipe blindly because you may think "I'll find this obscure ingredient - no problem" but then when you go to the store it's nowhere to be found... or no one has ever heard of it! Most recipes I make have simple ingredients, but this is just a cautionary warning to research all the strange ingredients before you commit to the recipe.