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.