when good dinners go bad

sometimes I cook dinner from a new recipe and it doesn't taste good. This is slightly sad for me because I feel like I just wasted a meal. If I ruin dinner I don't have a chance to have a good one until the next day. But new recipes are like that, sometimes they turn out really well. I have to accept that there is a balance, but I don't have to like it.
So tonight I cooked what was supposed to be pad thai. I was in the bulk store the other day looking at all the sauces on the Asian food aisle. In Hawaii we don't have Asian food sections, we have asian food aisles. There are so many sauces. So I look at them and dream about knowing what to do with them. most of them contain some kind of meat product, so I don't normally get them. One time I bought this black bean sauce that sat in the refrigerator until I was sure it was no longer safe to eat. So I saw this pad thai sauce and picked it up and looked at the back and I saw a recipe where it read to put bean thread noodles in with this sauce and some tofu so I thought I can do that. It didn't even occur to me to read the ingredients list on the container because I confused it with reading the recipe. So last night I was looking on foodnetwork.com for other recipes of pad thai and all of them had fish sauce in it. So I checked, my sauce had anchovies. I was still going to make it though, just not for clyde. so tonight I made it. Here is what went down:
I soaked the noodles in water for an hour and then fried them up until they were clear. they weren't the way I think of glass noodles. Is bean threads glass noodles? I fried the tofu like normal. I put it together and with the sauce and vegetables from todays lunch salad. I was not even really close to the one on the container that read to add just green onions, peanuts, and something else that I didn't add. it was too sweet. The sauce was. I put in cumin, but to no avail. too sweet. So I am not sure about pad thai, if anyone has a good recipe let me know.