Kitchen Experiments - err....make that Kitchen Disaster!

I had a holiday in the middle of the week and thought it would be an excellent time to try replicating one of my favourite sandwiches at Subway in my kitchen. The Chicken Meatball Marinara is one sandwich you can enjoy without any guilt - if you eat it the way I do. No cheese, no mayo-based sauces - and Subway doesnt butter the bread, anway. Simple and flavoursome. But paying INR 105 for such a simple dish makes me break out in goosebumps - so this sandwich was next on my 'To Try' list.
However, given my family's vegetarian leanings, the supply of soya granules in the store supboard and the plethora of 'veggie meatballs' recipes on the Net, I decided to make a vegetarian version of my favourite sandwich.
And it flopped - miserably!
The details are too painful (and too long!) to get into, and in all honesty, I wasnt going to post this spectacular debacle on the blog at all - but I learnt a few important lessons which I would like to share with other fledgling cooks:

1. Soya has an incredibly resistant flavour. NOTHING can cloak it. Only a few spices/aromatics complement it and make it taste yummy. (Far-eastern condiments do the trick - not surprising, given soya's origins!) Do not overestimate your ability to give lift to the flavour of a soya-based dish - the meaty-yet-not-meat aroma is all pervasive.

2. Think twice (nay, several times!) before you substitute one type of nut for another. Each nut has a different flavour and oil content. My recipe called for powdered pecans/walnuts and having powdered peanuts on hand (danyacha koot!) I used that instead. DISASTER! This was the step that was the beginning of the end, as far as my sandwich recipe went. Peanuts, too, have a strong flavour (sweetish) which cannot be masked easily. I wanted the nuts to give the 'meat'balls just some bite and body (not flavour) and they ended up doing just the opposite - they made the dough runny(because of the oil they released) and peanut-flavoured!

3. Dont try to salvage a dish which is beyond repair. It's best to throw a failed experiment in the bin - rather than slave over it for hours, expending time, energy and money trying to make it edible. The effort is like a Wagnerian opera - things just keep on getting worse and worse till the end comes (ie. you snap, throw away the dish and storm out of the kitchen in a haze of tears/anger/bitterness)

I was so disheartened by this disaster (I am normally a reasonably talented cook!) and the peanutty smell pervading my kitchen, that I thought I wouldnt be able to face another kitchen experiment ever again. But, now, after a passage of 3 days, I feel better. Perhaps I am not upto juggling with ingredients and playing around with established recipes yet - but that doesnt mean I can't come up with my own, from scratch! :D