Fortunately for me, Oregon shares my love of the strange and unusual (you've seen "Portlandia", I'm sure). Unfortunately for me, I live with a tight budget and one picky eater. I can usually get around the latter by just not telling him what he's eating; I once made a root vegetable penne rigate and he picked out all of the parsnips (which he likes) because he thought that they were potatoes (which he hates), while he ate all of the sweet potatoes (thinking they were carrot bits). The less Ben knows, the more I can get away with culinary novelty.
This week found him in a rare open-minded window, which was nice because I was itching to break away from beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. Still keeping his mild xenophobia in mind, I eased him into my kinky world of animal consumption with a Greek-style penne with lamb, tomatoes, parsnips, and cinnamon (I skipped the feta and the parsley). He was frustrated before I even started cooking, since only cuts of lamb were available at my favorite butcher shop in history, and he had to wait around for it to be ground to a fine, protein-rich pulp. The balancing between cooking meat, simmering vegetables, and boiling pasta was also a trick with our one burner, so the electric skillet was put on pasta duty while my Calphalon 10-inch super pan did double duty with the meat and vegetables. At last I put everything to simmer for a few minutes, pleased with my work and feeling validated enough to put on a favorite movie of mine while I finished cooking.
Oh hot damn, that was some tasty lamb (paired with Concannon cabernet).
On a side note, I think it's unfortunate that so much attention is paid to pairing wine and beer with food, but there is little regard to pairing fine films with any of the aforementioned three. For my part, I say that this dish is ideally served with "Inglorious Basterds" or anything else with Michael Fassbender's glorious accent (except, perhaps, "Hunger", which is too rough to be paired with anything except sorrow).
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