After finishing the diverse leafy green salad with multiple mix-ins I’d fixed, I was busily programming and forgot that I’d left some homemade meat sauce simmering on the stove. When I got up from my desk to prepare the macaroni main dish I thought I’d heated and left cooling, I found the tomato sauce boiled almost dry, mostly blackened halfway through. Being one game for experimentation and not inclined to throwing away something I’d put a fair amount of work into, I added some water to the pan and stirred the resulting mixture – how bad could it be? Well, it was pretty bad, but not completely horrible: Surely there must be a way to recover this! From the suggestions that were offered, I decided to stir in some butter, honey and cumin powder. A couple of adjustments later I had an interesting kind of barbequed flavor with a hint of Indian cuisine that was actually pretty good: What had started out as likely to be a plain (somewhat boring) bowl of elbows and tomato sauce, and could easily have been discarded as a disaster, turned into rather new and unique eating adventure.

Recipes are great, but knowing how to cook and not being afraid to try something new can definitely lead to some unexpected palate discoveries!