the beauty of mistakes

Two-thirds of a good dinner

Joanne Audette, a reader of the Facebook edition of Mexpatriate, issued me a challenge about a month ago.

She found my cooking posts to be interesting, but she wanted to hear about my disasters in the kitchen.

We all have them. And I know I have had my portion of spending three or four hours in the kitchen only to share dishes gone bad with the neighborhood dogs. When the dogs refuse to eat offered food, and it does happen, that is a certain sign that something went Really Wrong.

I do not mind mistakes. It is from failures that we learn. Even though I firmly believe that, when I sat down to relate some of those lessons learned, I could not recall a single one.

That is not entirely true. I did remember one. About two years ago, I foolishly combined basil and mint in a salad dressing because I had never before tasted the combination. It made my entire salad taste as if I had emptied the clippings from the lawnmower in my bowl. I will never try that combination again.

However, that was it. I know there have been others. I suspect I had done what most of us do in life. I had completely forgotten what was a bad experience. If bad things have happened to me, I have no memory of them.

But do not despair Joanne. The roadshow that is my life saved this story arc.

My blogger pal Jennifer Rose cooked a beef roast in her Instant Pot the other day and enticed me into trying my hand at something similar. I had every intention of buying a beef roast, but the butcher had a cut of pork leg that held far more promise. Michelangelo saw living forms trapped in blocks of marble. I see memorable meals trapped in pork legs.

Because I have not used my Instant Pot lately, I called it into service to prepare my version of pork saag -- one of my favorite Indian dishes. Actually, it would not really be a saag because I had decided not to add arugula or spinach. But you get the idea.

I marinated and spiced the pork as I would have if I had cooked it in a pan. I then made a culinary blunder. As it turned out, a big one. And it was not the lack of greens.

I still have not developed any subtle skills when using a pressure cooker. One of the consistent warnings I have read is to never cook without adequate liquid added to the cooker -- or too much. In this case, I had marinated the pork in half-and-half. There seemed to be adequate liquid, But I followed the advice of Urvashi Pitre, my Instant Pot guru. She suggested adding three-quarters of a cup of water to the mixture. I reduced it to one-third.

Even that was too much. A good pork saag should have a rich fatty taste with subtle layers of spices. Our housekeeper, Zella Kuzba, used to put the same tea bag to service for a full week. That is what this saag tasted like -- like Zella's tea bag on the seventh day. It had the mere echo of some long-forgotten flavor.

It was not terrible. It was simply not good. For dinner, I combined it with gnocchi in a garlic-parmesan-gorgonzola sauce, and blistered soy asparagus. Both of those dishes were fine. I ate a couple pieces of the saag and scraped the rest into the large bowl of leftovers.

I was prepared to find a dog who appeared to be less-picky than I am until Omar said he liked the saag. I just needed to find a way to resurrect it.

My father loved ground beef sandwiches. I am not talking about hamburger here. I mean ground beef. Every Sunday he would cook a roast. If some of the beef was left over, he would run it through a meat mill along with chopped onion and spices. It was one of the best sandwich spreads I have ever tasted. Simple and flavor-filled.

If it was good enough for my father, it should be good enough for me. Over the years, I have developed several pâté techniques. Earlier in the week I had put together a Portuguese sardine pâté. I decided to try a similar technique to turn the saag into something edible.

So, I tossed some butter, onion, garlic, pickled jalapeños, sweet relish, tomato sauce, mustard, capers, and the saag into my food processor. The result was not quite what I wanted. The watery taste was gone, but something was missing.

What it needed was a strong herb. Oregano, thyme, and marjoram struck me as being too pedestrian. Then I saw it, a jar of French tarragon. I added a healthy dose to the meat mixture, pulsed, and the result was exactly what I was after.

Yes. Yes. I know. Pâtés never photograph well. 

It certainly was not the dish I originally set out to make. But, as you have said, Joanne, our lives are improved by the mistakes we have made.

I now have a deviled pork saag ready for sandwiches -- or, as I did last night while watching Bridge of Spies, spread on crackers.

The neighborhood dogs are just going to have to wait for another experiment gone bad.