I must confess: I am a world-class perfectionist. So much so that I put off a lot of things that I don’t do well enough, and thus cannot be judged on them. One of those things is cooking. If you could see the piles of recipe tear-sheets, you would think that I were a caterer, or at least a proficient home cook. Not so, but I’m resolving to improve by baby steps. Last night, I made raspberry muffins from an August 2005 issue of Real Simple. Elapsed time from tear-sheet to baking? Around 20 months. They turned out well. My son would prefer blueberry, but I didn’t make any substitutions for the trial run. It felt good to actually follow through on the plan – it didn’t have to be perfect; it just had to be good enough. (Perfection would have entailed rising early, making the muffins for breakfast and serving them warm from the oven.) I still have a huge fear of throwing parties: the food, the house, the guest list, not to mention, you need to serve more than one dish a parties, and I have not mastered timing. How do you get over that fear? What are the baby steps: a muffins only party? Kidding.