I killed the chocolate chips. Again. That makes me a repeat offender. The first time was bad enough. Doing it again was plain stupid. Which brings me to a horrible insight. Am I unable to learn from my mistakes? How to Avoid Mistake Number 1: Don’t be in a hurry. It all started last night. I had no sweets in the house. My chocoholic self needed chocolate chip cookies. Immediately. I’ve fooled around with the traditional Nestle Toll House recipe so I use rice flour, honey and melted butter instead of the traditional ingredients of white flour, white and brown sugar and shortening. But the recipe calls for softened butter, the perfectionists among you say. The crux of the problem. I live in the Northwest and it doesn’t soften enough to make my old mixer or me happy. And I do have to add more flour so the batter is less runny. It’s worth it to see the melted pot of gold. And herein lies the problem. Melted butter and honey are very warm. How to Avoid Mistake Number 2: Learn from previous errors. I know what happens to chocolate chips in batter that is too warm having done it once before. This time, I even felt the bowl and hoped that it wasn’t too hot. How to Avoid Mistake Number 3: Don’t just hope. I poured the 16 ounces of chocolate chips into the batter. (I know it calls for 12 ounces. I told you I was a chocoholic.) One stir was all it took. Warm butter (even when mixed with everything else) melts chocolate chips faster than you can remove them. If you want marbleized cookies, go ahead. If you stir too much, you’ll get chocolate cookies. While both kinds are fine for my husband, I like to savor chewy chocolate chips. Alas, now I have a double batch of designer cookies–snickering because they know I’ll eat them. There is no joy knowing there are no chocolate chip morsels. Which leads me to wonder how many times in our lives we choose to do something the same way when we know it won’t give us the results we want? What good is hoping that this time it might be different? What is it going to take to make us stop repeating our mistakes and learn from them the first time?