There's no guarantee in life that if you follow a recipe, things will turn out OK, but hopefully next time you try to cook something up, you'll know which recipe to avoid - the recipe for disaster.
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You see that everywhere.
In the kitchen.
In Parliament.
In the "messages sent" box of your former Test cricket captain's mobile phone.
I found it out the other day trying to make samosas.
Those universally admired sausage rolls of the sub-continent.
And hopefully I'm not offending samosa purists by likening them to sausage rolls.
Perhaps that will be legal once the PM gets his Religious Freedoms bill through.
Who knows?
It's always hard making sense of legislation that seems to lack any.
A bit like comprehending how someone with a dick pic scandal hanging over their head can be installed as Test captain in order to clean up a cheating scandal.
No doubt, life can get complicated, and I guess it's better to focus on things closer to home, like my samosas, which didn't end up the way I hoped either.
Even though I had a recipe.
Recipes, like disasters, seem to assume idiots do or don't do that.
And the fact I didn't meant I had to ad lib on the garam masala - a key ingredient in my samosa recipe.
Similar perhaps to rebel Federal MPs in that garam masala is made up of an amalgam of spices, each individually unpleasant, and hard to control unless measured correctly.
Like our PM, I took a faith-based approach and lost control of the flavour narrative.
The result was samosa filling that was miraculously "bland yet intensely awful", as someone said when eventually they gave it a taste.
Just the one taste as it turned out.
And no, that wasn't a reference to how many terms the PM may serve come election time next year.
Just how inedible my filling was.
But before the eating came the cooking.
Having combined my spice lottery with a ton of spinach, which is growing out of control in my vegie garden during La Nina x 2, a bit like anti-vax sentiment, I commenced construction and decimation of said samosa.
Again, I ad libbed, this time with the wrap, using rice paper roll.
Toilet paper roll might have produced a more crispy finish when fried.
The resultant sludge wasn't going to plate up well even if I managed to scrape it off the fry pan.
And no, that wasn't a reference to our Ashes build-up.
So I did the only thing a desperate unskilled samosa maker, or cricket administrator, or politician would do under the circumstances, I fry-boiled some more.
Which only succeeded in stinking out the house, adding another layer of ambience to what was on track to be a fairly all-round unpalatable outcome.
Fair to say what ended up on the plate, looked worse than it tasted, which was really saying something.
Not that anyone spoke much at dinner.
Just a few prods amid the feeling that someone had somehow managed to follow a recipe for disaster again.
