Experiments

Even though I usually think of cooking as a solo activity--something I do when I'm alone in the house, or to decompress for an hour after a stressful day--I also like to cook with friends. It's good for me, because I learn other people's tricks and favorite flavor combinations, and I end up making things I wouldn't come up with on my own. Case in point: cooking with Martin the other day. I had officially declared it "sandwich night" at my house, but also had a date to hang out with Martin all afternoon and cook, so we invented a sandwich filling. A crazy sandwich filling. Rutabacon!

Yes, it's bacon made from rutabaga. I can't give you a recipe, but I can tell you that we sliced all the root veggies we could find (carrot, parsnip, sweet potato, rutabaga, celeriac, etc) into thin, bacon-shaped strips, marinated them in a nice salty, oily sauce that was really a bit more like barbecue sauce than bacon flavoring, and cooked the strips on a cast-iron griddle until they were good and burnt the way bacon should be. They made a great rutabacon, arugula, tomato, and avocado sandwich that I wanted to take a picture of, but couldn't find my camera and I was too hungry to go searching for it!