The butter darkened in the pan before I meant it to.
I'd come home from the market with a paper bag of chanterelles from the Nguyen family stall — the last good ones of the season, they said, and the Nguyens were not people who oversold things. The mushrooms were pale gold and still damp from the morning rain, smelling of wet pine and something almost meaty underneath, the way the forest floor smells in October after two days of drizzle.
I'd planned to go low and slow. But the left side of the burner ran hot the way it always does, and I got distracted trimming the stems, and by the time I looked up the butter had moved past foaming into something darker and nutty. I lifted the pan off the flame, counted to twenty, and decided to keep going. What the mistake gave back: browned butter and chanterelles turn out to be a better pairing than the gentler version I'd had in mind.