THE A-Z OF FAILURES

How to Be a Failure (Part P)

Making the mistakes so you don’t have to

Photo by Yan Krukov

Pestle and mortar

It all started with a Jamie Oliver recipe that required bashing a mix of herbs and spices in a pestle and mortar and then adding olive oil and bashing them some more.

The problem was that my pestle (or is it the mortar?) wasn’t big enough to hold all of the ingredients:

My too small pestle and mortar. Photo by the author with items helpfully arranged nearby to give a sense of proportion.

So I did a lot of research which said that a good pestle and mortar is an investment and you should get the biggest one you can afford. I found a website, and the biggest one I could afford was 7 inches in diameter. I have failed before at measurements, so I tried to work out how big it would be:

Looks OK to me. Photo by author

It looked OK, but I have learnt the hard way the wisdom of the instruction to always “measure twice”, so off I went in search of something round that had a 7-inch diameter: