Good to be bad

10:17

I think I started writing again to have something to be bad at, when necessary, something to neglect, and amuse myself by neglecting.

No alcohol for four days now!  Although… a few weeks ago, I made Mark Bittman’s recipe for braised lentils.  I approximated the seasonings, and they were fine.  Not amazing, but perfectly reasonable.  The sauce was very thin, though, and I worried there wasn’t enough liquid to prevent freezer burn.  So I emptied half (maybe a third?) of a bottle of wine into the pyrex container with the lentils, popped the container in the freezer, and hoped for the best.  It’s less random than it sounds — the recipe called for a cup or so of wine in the original braise.

Upside: no freezer burn when I removed the lentils.  Downside: what, exactly was I going to do with the wine, which was going to sour once out of the freezer?  Also, who needs drunken lentils?  The wine was good only as a preservative, not as a flavor enhancer. (That said, the wine froze nicely.  Next time I have some good wine I don’t want to waste, I’ll pour it into an ice tray and drink the melted cubes later.)  I poured off the wine, but not very well.  I didn’t rinse the lentils, or even put them in a colander to drain properly (didn’t think of that, even).  Today, four days after the defrost, I ate the lentils over rice for dinner.  They tasted odd.  I poured on olive oil and salt told myself that was the over-aged wine, not spoiled beans.  I should know by 2am if I was right.

This was not the way I thought I would cheat.  I dumped out the rest of the lentils.

10:29