My brain is not working properly since the last couple of days (read weeks, months, years). Don’t worry I am not suffering from any medical condition alhamdulillah, just going through the usual ‘being forgetful’ phase AKA life-long extension of mommy brain disorder… lol.

So, I was preparing for pizza dough last week with the innocent intention of doubling the recipe (I usually do that so that I can store 1 or 2 parts of the dough for future use). I don’t know HOW and WHY I soaked the yeast in THREE cups of water instead of ONE (which the recipe says). The amount of water was now 6 times but all other ingredients were added keeping the doubled quantity in mind (imagine the INTENSITY of blunder). The oversight became evident to me when I casually started adding the flour to the mixture which turned into a watery sticky liquid. I was like WTH, this never occurs, my recipe is so damn foolproof. How can this happen?

I started adding more flour into the mixture (without thinking) while freaking out inside. I added more, a little more, some more but the mixture was not coming closer to look like dough until I emptied the whole 1.5 kg flour packet. Meanwhile, the realization hit me that the ratio of yeast, sugar, oil and milk is now wayyy less than it should have been. I was on the verge of having a panic attack but just then I washed my hands and sat down for a while thinking about what could be done in order to rectify the situation.

The instant I acknowledged ‘what’s done is done’ and now I have to find a way out of it was the moment I was able to think about a logical solution of the whole problem. Quickly I made my way to the nearest supermarket, grabbed some more flour, came back, added all other ingredients with flour to the dough, recited/blew all the ayahs I could think of at that time, and placed it aside to let rise with crossed fingers. (I really couldn’t imagine wasting this much food just because of my inattention)

You know what, this is so unlike me – sitting down calmly for a while in between a chaotic situation and trying to figure a way out. A few years ago, in a similar situation like this (no matter how big or small), I would have fretted, gotten annoyed and whined rather than fixing the problem first and then evaluating the cause later on. I can shamelessly admit that this approach never helped me in the resolution of any issue rapidly or smartly until HI urged me to concentrate on settling the issue before determining the root cause of the mishap. Yes, my husband taught me to change my outlook towards tackling the mistakes. This definitely made a huge difference in decreasing the time to crack the (mistaken) code and getting things back on track again.

The dough DID rise and in the end, the pizzas tasted yummm as always. And I had a truckload stock of pizza dough to store as well which means lots of quick effortless meals for a while.

Also, the recipe is already shared on the blog here – it’s so good by the way, seriously!

In short; by sharing about this silly mistake in this much detail, all I wanna state is:

• Making mistakes is a ‘HUMAN’ characteristic – TOTALLY NORMAL.
• Your behaviour towards the mistake is all that matters,
  • ACCEPT the reality and own your fault
  • DON’T agonize, get annoyed or cry over what has been done – it’s already DONE! You are only gonna waste time and energy if you opt in favour of these (ok, do it a little – I know it’s natural).
  • But Bounce back to sanity as quickly as you can
  • THINK about a corrective measure
  • Focus on WHAT can be done rather than crying over the spilt milk
  • PERFORM the remedial action
• DO NOT ignore the mistake – DO something about it. It’s not gonna be OK on its own. (I have done this once when I was sure about a blunder and the outcome was disastrous)
• Keep the stressing over ‘HOW’ part for the end as part of ‘Lessons Learnt’ exercise and ‘Continuous improvement programme’
• The outcome of a mistake can be REWARDING at times iff you follow an unerring approach to neutralize the situation. (Like there are now around 8-9 parts of pizza dough happily sitting in my freezer)
• And Things CAN go wrong at any point in time even if you are a master at doing those ‘things’ so never feel bad. Some days are difficult for all of us!
• Also, DON’T go too hard on yourself. FORGIVE yourself for being amateur but never FORGET, learn from the experience and move on but retain the data for future reference 😉- you can easily do that if you are a woman (they are champion at doing this, haina?)
• Mistakes make us all wiser, stronger and better! So, keep on goofing around… Haha

Check out the flowchart I have devised (both in English and Urdu) in order to keep myself focused on the occurrence of any such idiotic event – feeling like an engineer after ages🙈.

English

Urdu

I hope reading this all has made you feel better about all the boo-boos (either big or small) you have ever done in your life. Let me know about some of those and how did you manage to fix them in the comments below so that we can all laugh and learn from them together.