Wingspouse Blog

I was cooking up a storm last week, after my sister-in-law gave me a copy of January’s Semi-Homemade magazine. Everything looked so good, and the real thing wasn’t far off from the pictures. We loved the fruit-topped salmon, roasted chicken and vegetables, and apple-accented pork loin. Then I ran out of recipes. I really wanted to keep making new meals, so I reached into my cupboard and pulled out some old copies of Food & Wine I had never made the time to peruse. Three issues later, I hadn’t found a single recipe that sounded good. Many of them had pickled this or imported that. Some of the recipes were downright weird. Who would want to eat Pickle-Brined Chicken or Olive Oil Bundt Cake? And what the heck is a Feta-filled Arepa? The pictures on the covers were nowhere to be found inside the pages.

I decided to entertain myself with a culinary challenge: Create a meal using the weirdest ingredient in my cupboard and abandon standard practice. I headed to the pantry. There in the very back was a bag of tamarind paste (a Mexican treat) that I had purchased out of curiosity one day. It was the nastiest tasting stuff any of us ever. It was the texture of ground dates, but tasted a little more like sour apricots. This was perfect! Now all I needed was an interesting piece of meat. I dug out some frozen short ribs left over from a side of beef and headed back to the kitchen.

My first thought was to mix it with soy sauce. The sweetness of the tamarind would work well in a barbecue sauce. I stopped. I was not going to cheat. This was going to be something off the beaten path. I even avoided curry, which would have been another safe choice.

I ended up throwing in some tomato paste, cinnamon, smoked pepper, cayenne pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, and ground mustard. My son walked into the kitchen and stared me down like I had lost it. Maybe I had.

Well, the ribs ended up being totally and unpredictably delicious! They smelled so good cooking, that they disappeared before they made it to the table. Who would have guessed? Well, maybe some editor of Food & Wine might have, but I didn’t.

Okay. Time to fess up. Those ribs didn’t make it to the table because they went straight into the trash can. I was brave enough to taste them and had to use mouthwash to get rid of the awful taste. I did have fun though. Aren’t they deceivingly beautiful?