Sometimes when you screw up in the kitchen, it’s an outright failure. But sometimes it just takes a mental realignment to turn a loss into a win.

I attempted to make *gulyas alla triestina* for dinner. I’ve made this before and it’s delicious and not as hard as it sounds. It’s beef stew with pancetta, red wine, lots of onions, and smoked paprika. It takes well to improvisation, but I screwed it up tonight because I tried to be clever.

Gulyas is a perfect dish for the pressure cooker, because the stew’s flavors are so big that they can’t be destroyed by 250 degrees of braising power. I wanted a vegetable to go with the stew, and savoy cabbage seemed like the perfect thing. Dinnertime was approaching. I popped open the cooker and found that the meat was almost done, but not quite. “I know, I’ll just throw the cabbage in on top and cook it a few more minutes.”

The trouble is, there’s a special pressure cooker warning when you’re making beef: if you let the pressure out quickly, the meat gets tough. I’d never tested this and frankly believed it was an urban legend, like the idea that you have to soak beans. Bean-soaking is still hooey, but the rule of beef is true. Suddenly it was dinnertime, and all I could do was let out the pressure (in an impressive jet of steam) and hope for the best. I opened the pot to find raw cabbage and unyielding nuggets of meat.

Luckily, there was another pot on the stove that stepped in to save the day. It was full of Anson Mills polenta. Honestly, this pot was doing its best to fuck with me, too. When I tasted the polenta to make sure it was coming along, I tasted a weird raw vegetable flavor that was oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I realized that it tasted exactly like a fresh, green cornhusk smells. This is serious polenta. A few more minutes and an application of butter and Parmigiano, and it was perfect. (At one point I laughed, because I hadn’t planned ahead what kind of stew I was going to make, and I knew that on the calendar I had written “stew over polenta,” and there I was, actually stewing over polenta.)

Now, you’re probably way ahead of me, but what I realized was: the best part of any stew isn’t the meat, which if you’ve done your job has basically turned to tofu: easy to chew, great at soaking up flavors, not very interesting by itself. So I had this great smoky sauce (with chunks of slab bacon), a big bowl of polenta, and one two-year-old who loves polenta and any kind of sauce. We chucked the meat and ate all the sauce and most of the polenta, although there’s some left to make fried polenta tomorrow, and Iris only had a few bites because I mentioned there would be dessert.

Dessert was vanilla ice cream with poached rhubarb. No problems there.