One of my favorite things about our new house (besides everything!) is the luxury of having a nice big open kitchen. I LOVE to cook, and bake, and get creative with food. The washing and chopping is a Meditation. The interplay of textures and flavors is Alchemy. The successes are glorious, and failures? Often quite spectacular. Life lessons abound. Sometimes, still, though not nearly as often as when I first started cooking as a young girl- my culinary disasters are so embarrassing that I cry and rage and sulk, angrily dumping the mess in the trash with SUCH scorn for…