You Take The Good, You Take The Bad: “On Experimentation”

Most of the time when you “experiment” it ends up being fine. Because, honestly, unless you’re some kind of superfreak with bizarro animal parts, there’s a small swath of culinary territory that people traverse. It’s not really all that experimental to dump rooster sauce on some noodles; I’m sure most ingredients we have on hand interact well together. So it was with not a small amount of hubris that I dumped almost a full bottle of leftover beer in our gruel the other day.

And just to be clear, when I say “leftover” what I mean is a half-consumed bottle of beer left out overnight because we were too “tired” to finish cleaning. Two of them.

In short, I learned that you can’t really use beer to cook lentils/quinoa/bulgur wheat. One, it tastes like shit. I’m not really sure why, but it does. Intensely yeasty, overbearing and, frankly, mostly bizarre. I’m not totally clear why this is, but I’ve tasted it and know not to ever try it again.

Two — and this is not insignificant — after doing a little bit of googling it seemed that the alcohol doesn’t really get cooked out as fast or as thoroughly as you assumed, making this a poor choice to feed young children. In short, I cooked it, but ended up throwing it out.

So that was that. But then there was using orange zest in the weekly lamb “koftas” or more accurately oblong meatballs made from lamb. There’s a Greek sausage called Loukaniko that has an orange flavor. It turns out that that flavor actually comes from orange zest (or peels, but that seems a little intense). So then it makes sense that dumping the zest of an entire orange would work. Because it did! These hefty oblong-shaped meatballs cooked to lamb perfection at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

On Lamb

This Melissa Clark recipe for Lamb-and-White-Bean Chili was good. Full disclosure: I omitted the two poblano peppers (and two small green peppers substitute for the two poblano peppers), the cilantro (both the finely chopped stems and the leaves for garnish) and the two small jalapenos. Also, I switched the white beans for some very old white tepary beans I had in the cupboard and had been meaning to get rid of. I skipped the lime, as well, but we added dried mint afterward. So I sort of made this recipe.

How many recipes does this happen with? For me, it’s probably 90 to 95 percent of them.

Jen has been wanting to eat more lamb, so we tried chili with lamb. I think it’s kind of great: beans love fat, or more accurately, people love beans that commingle with fat. Speaking of oozing lamb fat, there was a good tip in this recipe, which was to brown the meat and let it rest on a paper towel on a plate, which soaked up a lot of fat.

For a cocktail, we tried a Jack Rose, which Jen read about in the new, improved Sunday Motherfucking Times Magazine. The hook in this particular piece in the new, improved Motherfucking Magazine was “the classic cocktail that never got invited to the oldies reunion.” It was OK. To be fair, we used the Applejack on hand and not the Laird 100-proof straight apple brandy in the recipe. But as they say, don’t let the accurate be the enemy of the available.