Kitchen Roulette

So there I was, waiting to talk to my investment advisor with other Boomer types — two elderly sisters dressed, if not elegantly, then certainly with style, and a gamey‑looking guy in shorts and a ballcap who seemed as if he had just stopped scraping barnacles off the hull of his sailboat — when a new show came on.

Up until then, the massive screen in the waiting area carried the usual financial programming about the S&P 500, tech stocks, Treasuries, and whether some hunched‑over guy with GI glasses was going to cut interest rates. But the new show was all about cooking — specifically, how to create wonderful dishes out of the scraps most kitchens throw away. In other words, garbage.

The guy was oblivious. The sisters demurred. I sat up.

This was my kind of show, especially since it was a competition among three chefs to see who could make the most of the worst. Apparently, “the worst” could include things like shrimp shells, dandelion greens, sweetbreads, carrot peels, mashed‑potato candy, and nutria testicles. That last one got me until I looked it up and discovered it wasn’t an artificial sweetener at all but an aquatic rodent. Think massive swamp rats.

So the three chefs got to work, each trying to come up with a wonderful dish given the surprise ingredients provided in a “mystery basket,” presumably containing scraps from the previous cooking show. I don’t know if that’s really true, but it would be nice — something akin to not wasting any part of the bison.

The common categories of scraps these chefs had to work with were the following:

• unusual proteins
• odd fruits and vegetables
• pantry oddities
• unexpected pairings
• extreme curveballs.

Note: Rooster testicles — unlike the rodents — were listed just once, under unusual proteins but not extreme curveballs. Frankly, I’d put all testicles in curveballs, but that’s me.

By the time each chef had decided on a dish (e.g., duck breast with kumquat glaze), it was time for me to meet my advisor, so I didn’t find out who won. I did catch one of them boiling over a pot of rice, though — something I managed to do myself the other day while still undercooking the rice. Overcooking the water while undercooking the rice (pasta, oatmeal, vegetables, etc.) is a specialty of mine. I don’t know if there’s a category for that, but I am going to suggest something that maybe the Food Network will pick up.

I call it “Kitchen Roulette,” and it reflects my type of cooking. Which type is that, you ask? It consists of two categories: hoarding things like a prepper — everything from pinto beans and macaroni to bone broth — and eating expired food (see Cooking (or Not) With Nonno).

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t go out of my way to eat expired food. It’s just that my sense of time is about as off as my sense of space, which is why I can’t even use Google Maps without help. The fact that my phone is in French doesn’t help, pas du tout — I set it that way to frustrate would‑be thieves. Then again, I have an iPhone 8, so it may not even need French. It’s so old I can’t trade it in. Maybe I should contact the Smithsonian.

Here’s my idea for Kitchen Roulette: get a bunch of Boomers in a kitchen to compete using expired cans of prepper food like tuna and evaporated milk. Divide them into teams and give each team twenty minutes to come up with a dish that is unique, edible, and doesn’t give you botulism. If the judges don’t start vomiting by the end of the show, they can certify the winner. Winners will receive a cash prize, appear in AARP Magazine, and have a chance to host their own podcast.

Now, even though I am eminently qualified to enter the show — having eaten things like five‑day‑old trout from Safeway after walking home three miles with it in the sun, undercooked bacon because I like fat (Roger, Bacon), and black broccoli out of curiosity (Black Broccoli, Yellow Snow) — I declare myself ineligible to compete due to ethical considerations. It wouldn’t be right for me to take advantage of those with little to no experience in the field of expiration dates. After all, I once snatched an expired but unopened bag of fortune cookies from a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant. It provided months of fortune‑telling fun for me and the family.

In the meantime, I filled more than a dozen empty gin, wine, and champagne bottles I’ve collected over the years with filtered water. I set them in the sun for an hour, corked the bottles, and stored them in a cabinet in my kitchen. They’re next to stacks of sardines, macaroni and cheese, and my ten‑piece Calphalon cooking set. Did you know they count the lids in the total? I think that’s cheating.

Look for Kitchen Roulette in spring of 2026.

---

Image credits: A Chosen Soul, Annie Spratt. Want more? Click on “Amazon” for other publications or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below, or contact us through the Contact tab above.