KITCHEN ADVENTURES: WITH HONEY AND WITH VINEGAR. I’m not really sure why this fit came on me; but I had extra honey lying around, with many other leftoverish things and staples, and I figured I might try combining some of them. We have one success and one failure to report.

Spicy honey vinaigrette: I don’t really know what a vinaigrette is, but my impression is that this would count. These quantities were for a side dish for one person. All quantities are even more approximate than they appear, and you should change them radically to accommodate your tastes.

Chop two cloves garlic; saute with a small amount of honey (I don’t think it could have been more than a teaspoon?), a splash of balsamic vinegar, some cayenne, dashes of five-spice powder and curry powder, a small splash of olive oil, and the juice from half a lemon. Just saute it, stirring, until the garlic is well-cooked and fragrant, but not more than a tiny bit browned.

I ate this with 6 oz. well-cooked spinach. That was fine, but not the way to make the vinaigrette shine. The dark, vegetable taste of the spinach kind of got lost under the bright, sweet tanginess of the vinaigrette; and there was nothing to cut the heat from the cayenne. Homemade, buttered croutons would have been a perfect addition. But I think this would work very well as a salad dressing, especially for a salad with good, conventional tastes–not like my Crazy Salad. You get some cherry tomatoes, crumbled feta cheese, croutons, mixed lettuces and all that sort of thing, and I think this would be terrific. …It might also look prettier if you substituted crushed red pepper for the cayenne. Those red flakes always look lovely in salad dressing. I think you’d need to use more then, to raise the heat level.

How did it taste? Well, I really liked that all of the flavors came out, and yet blended also. If I had to tweeze them apart, I think the flavors hit you like this: HOT balsamic vinegar and honey; garlic and spices, with lemon lilting in there at the end; spices and honey. So it finishes with a kind of exotic, spicy sweetness. People who like bottled hot sauces might like it. I’d expect you could use it as a marinade for chicken, since you can use anything as a marinade for chicken; and maybe also for pork, since people tend to pair pig and honey….

Honey-rosemary tomato sauce: Yeah, not so much. I saute’d chopped plum tomato, chopped sweet onion, chopped garlic, cayenne, five-spice powder, cumin, curry powder, dried rosemary (it was on sale–“don’t question me!”), and honey, for maybe ten minutes or a bit more, stirring occasionally (basically, got it bubbling hot and then lowered the heat to simmer for the rest of the pasta’s cooking time); and poured that over pasta, with one slice of ripped-up muenster cheese.

Too sweet. The later addition of grated Parmesan cheese helped a bit; but really, this was just too much sweetness, and looking at the ingredients list I don’t know why I didn’t realize that. The rosemary got completely hidden by the other flavors. This is edible, but it won’t answer the Chickpea Eater’s profound question, “Why do we say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ but not, ‘It doesn’t spirit’?”