Sometimes when you screw up in the kitchen, it’s an outright failure. But sometimes it just takes a mental realignment to turn a loss into a win.

I attempted to make *gulyas alla triestina* for dinner. I’ve made this before and it’s delicious and not as hard as it sounds. It’s beef stew with pancetta, red wine, lots of onions, and smoked paprika. It takes well to improvisation, but I screwed it up tonight because I tried to be clever.

Gulyas is a perfect dish for the pressure cooker, because the stew’s flavors are so big that they can’t be destroyed by 250 degrees of braising power. I wanted a vegetable to go with the stew, and savoy cabbage seemed like the perfect thing. Dinnertime was approaching. I popped open the cooker and found that the meat was almost done, but not quite. “I know, I’ll just throw the cabbage in on top and cook it a few more minutes.”

The trouble is, there’s a special pressure cooker warning when you’re making beef: if you let the pressure out quickly, the meat gets tough. I’d never tested this and frankly believed it was an urban legend, like the idea that you have to soak beans. Bean-soaking is still hooey, but the rule of beef is true. Suddenly it was dinnertime, and all I could do was let out the pressure (in an impressive jet of steam) and hope for the best. I opened the pot to find raw cabbage and unyielding nuggets of meat.

Luckily, there was another pot on the stove that stepped in to save the day. It was full of Anson Mills polenta. Honestly, this pot was doing its best to fuck with me, too. When I tasted the polenta to make sure it was coming along, I tasted a weird raw vegetable flavor that was oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I realized that it tasted exactly like a fresh, green cornhusk smells. This is serious polenta. A few more minutes and an application of butter and Parmigiano, and it was perfect. (At one point I laughed, because I hadn’t planned ahead what kind of stew I was going to make, and I knew that on the calendar I had written “stew over polenta,” and there I was, actually stewing over polenta.)

Now, you’re probably way ahead of me, but what I realized was: the best part of any stew isn’t the meat, which if you’ve done your job has basically turned to tofu: easy to chew, great at soaking up flavors, not very interesting by itself. So I had this great smoky sauce (with chunks of slab bacon), a big bowl of polenta, and one two-year-old who loves polenta and any kind of sauce. We chucked the meat and ate all the sauce and most of the polenta, although there’s some left to make fried polenta tomorrow, and Iris only had a few bites because I mentioned there would be dessert.

Dessert was vanilla ice cream with poached rhubarb. No problems there.

Iris and I are big fans of breakfast sausage. Some of the commercial brands aren’t so bad. I’ve been eating Brown and Serve since I was a kid. It’s not exactly good, but it tastes the same as it always has, even though you don’t have to brown it anymore (it’s microwaveable). Sometimes we buy spicy links from the farmers market, and it’s always quite tasty.

Last week, though, I made my own breakfast sausage. It was totally simple. Naturally, I used a recipe from Charcuterie. I ground a couple pounds of pork shoulder with sage, ginger, garlic, salt, and pepper. I’m still way too lazy to make links, so I cooked some patties right away and formed the rest into a log and put it in the freezer. It stays just barely sliceable, so now I can have great homemade breakfast sausage patties anytime–just slice off a few and fry them up in a skillet over medium-high. Takes about five minutes.

Next time I’ll throw in some crushed red pepper flakes. Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about making your own sausage–and I know you have–this is a great place to start. You could make chicken or turkey sausage just as easily–and the commercial turkey and chicken breakfast sausages are pretty terrible, so the gap between homemade and store-bought is going to be even bigger. If you don’t have a meat grinder, you can use the food processor, or just buy some good ground meat (or ask your supermarket butcher to grind it for you).

I wonder what I’ll come up with to complicate things in the kitchen next. I wonder if we could grow potatoes on our balcony. When it collapses, we can run downstairs and give the neighbors free potatoes.

I try to shy away from the “having a kid restores your own childlike sense of wonder” theme, because it’s true but dangerously boring.

But the other night I was planning to run down to Pagliacci for some slices, and Laurie said, “You know, we could have a pizza delivered.” Iris requested lots of olives on her pizza. She was impressed when, half an hour later, a woman showed up at the door with a pizza with lots of olives. The other half was the Brooklyn Bridge, which features pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onion, green peppers, and olives.

Iris weighs about one-sixth as much as I do, but she routinely eats half as much pizza or more.

Last night someone called from Pagliacci to check whether the pizza was delivered hot and otherwise to our liking. I should have put Iris on the phone.

I’m currently reading Eat This Book, about the world of competitive eating. The amount of food some people can put away in a competition is absolutely staggering. The gap between an average eater like me and a top competitive eater is much larger than most other individual sports I can think of. Like, I’d be terrible at the long jump, but there’s no way the world’s greatest long jumper could jump ten times as far as me. But the world’s greatest eater, Japan’s Takeru Kobayashi, routinely eats fifty hot dogs. Maybe I could eat five hot dogs if you offered me a large cash prize. There’s apparently no trick to it any more than there’s a trick to long-jumping: it’s a combination of genes, technique, and practice. (Kobayashi, incidentally, is a skinny guy, not a sumo wrestler.)

Today I could have used a little of the Kobayashi spirit, because I went on a taco crawl. A taco crawl is where a group of friends caravans around a neighborhood, hitting all the taquerias and sampling a taco or two at each one. Today’s crawl focused on White Center and Burien.

I made it to three taquerias before throwing in the towel. Admittedly, I had a hard time sticking to one taco per stand, as some of the more disciplined members of the crawl were doing. (Nobody seemed to be disciplined enough to order the same taco at each stand, though.)

When I say “taqueria,” I’m actually talking about taco trucks–two out of the three places I went to were trucks. I can’t explain why, but I’d be hard-pressed to name anything I consider cooler than a taco truck. To me, anything cooked in a truck tastes better. One of the truck, Taqueria El Rincón, added a bonus: you get to sit and eat in the truck, which is outfitted with stools and a counter on each side. That was my favorite stop of the day, partly because I got to eat in the truck and partly because I had a mulita.

I had little success tracking down the origin of the mulita, by which I mean I didn’t learn much in ten minutes on Google and Wikipedia. (I even checked Spanish Wikipedia, so you know I’m serious.) Two of the taco crawlers were friends from San Francisco, and they complained that they never see mulitas there. They seem to show up mostly in Seattle, LA, and Hawaii.

A mulita is the sort of thing you’d invent on the late-night shift at Taco Bell if Taco Bell had really great ingredients. Like a taco, it beings with two corn tortillas and your choice of meat. Unlike a taco, the meat is sandwiched between the tortillas, along with avocado (sometimes guacamole), cheese, cilantro, onions, and salsa. The mulita is then crisped on both sides on the griddle.

Of course, this will run you more than the regular taco. The going rate for mulitas in Seattle is $2.