Adventures in experimentation!

[Trepa Mayfield]

Come on, let's hear about the times you've gone off recipe, or made an entirely new one! I'll start.

So recently I've fallen out of the habit of cooking, which is a shame. And, as y'all know, the longer it is since you've last cooked, the harder it is to start again. Such was my situation when I was tasked to cook beef stroganoff. Such a situation lends itself to being put off, as I immediately did. Such was what lead to me, in the kitchen, making this recipe late at night when I was dead tired. And my brain gets twice as off-kilter as most people when I'm tired.

The recipe called in part to chop vegetables; I, in my only good judgement call of the night, decided I was in no fit state to do so. For those of you who've cooked beef stroganoff before, you'll know that it's basically impossible to make without chopping things. So I decided I was going to make my own recipe, and it was going to be way cooler than that sissy stroganoff. This was, for the record, the first time I had ever cooked without a recipe.

The beef was already frying, so I let it fry. I grabbed black beans (no chopping!) and rice (black beans go well with rice), and a thought occurred to me--I could make a sort of simmering dish, with the drippings from the black bean can taking the place of the juices from tomatoes normally found in such recipes. So I added some water as well, and some flour, to thicken it.

Sadly, I had grabbed sugar instead. We've all made that mistake before, right? They're both white, powdery, in burlap bags...

Well, since my simmer had already become sweet, I decided to go whole hog and add cinnamon as well. This was after I added the oregano, but fortunately before I added the chili pepper (which I omitted). It was still dangerously thin, so I looked at the original recipe and added the sour cream it prescribed.

At this point it occurred to me that this was a one note dish. Shouldn't there be some sort of vegetable? But all the vegetables needed to be chopped, but while I was looking my pot was unattended. In the end I just said "screw it", and chopped up some celery anyway (celery, like rice, takes a long time to soften. I thought it would go well with the long simmer).

All these things having been combined, I let it simmer (and hopefully thicken). 20 minutes later, I was even more tired, to the point where I had well passed "loopy" and moved straight onto "zombie". And yet the mixture still hadn't thickened enough. I frantically searched for a thickener I could add at this late point. Fortunately, I've had enough issues with spoiled milk to only use powdered milk, and there was a good deal of leftover powder from the last time I cooked. I added a small amount and prayed it would thicken. 5 minutes later it hadn't, really, but my brain was screaming "sleep, stupid!" so I poured it in a bowl in the fridge and hoped for the best.

The next day I tried it. Over noodles, for the record--I wasn't brave enough to try it as a soup. First of all, the smell--it was unholy. Literally unholy, like, if I ever need to desecrate a temple, this is what I will use. It smelled like the opposite of all that is good and righteous, if you can imagine.

And the taste...well, it didn't have one consistent taste. In parts, it was surprisingly bland--a basic milk/flour/sour cream core will do that, I suppose. But then, every so often, there were massive impacts of taste, without warning, that would depart with equal suddenness. And when I say massive, I mean...imagine snorting a vial of cinnamon. Yeah. There were, I think, three or four different types of taste explosions, like some sort of novelty candy. I have never eaten anything like it before, and probably never will again.

[sturmhauke]

Well there was this time I got wasted at a bar in Bangkok, and woke up the next day next to a couple of ladyboys and a goat... oh wait, that's not what you were talking about, was it?

[teela brown]

Once, when we were camping, I was making spaghetti for dinner. I didn't feel like trying to balance two pots on the Coleman stove, so I put the raw spaghetti right in the sauce to cook and felt very clever and efficient.

Except the spaghetti soaked up the sauce and the starch from the pasta thickened the sauce into something resembling red cement. It was completely inedible, so I left it out overnight on the picnic table to deal with in the morning. I looked out next morning to see a big raven trying to peck at the mess, but he wasn't able to put much of a dent in it.