A wadder

What’s a wadder? I’ll tell you at the end.

Last night I made a pasta recipe from a pin I found on Pinterest (if you want an invitation, let me know in the comments). I was intrigued by the balsamic reduction and hey, you can never go wrong with butter. I even thought it might be something to add to my son Ben's food blog.

It looked so yummy.

I always follow the recipe the first time I make it because I figure I won’t know how it was supposed to taste if I run around altering things right out of the gate. The one exception is that I will cut a recipe in half—there are just two of us and unless I’m positive we will love a new dish, I don’t want to risk having a lot of food we don’t like sitting around in the fridge.

And I had my doubts while making this dish. Partly it’s because the vinegar smelled awful while reducing, even though it was good vinegar. I was a little worried too that the combination of vinegar and brown sugar would lead to a sweet and sour taste, which I don’t care for in the least.

It didn’t taste like sweet and sour, I’ll give the dish that much. But it was awful. I asked Kent for his take on the dish and he said all he tasted was a thin sweet taste plus a very sharp bitter taste. I was less eloquent and said it was gross.

We always talk through dishes we’ve made for the first time, looking for ways to improve them or create alternatives so the dish is even more versatile. In my opinion, this dish would have been better served to have no vinegar or sugar, stick with the butter and put in a few hot pepper flakes. But then it’s changed beyond recognition from the original recipe and has become something else entirely. Something I might actually eat.

And here’s your weird word for the day: a wadder is what you call a ruined sewing project. You just wad that sucker up and move on. That’s what I’m doing with this recipe.