When I was a teenager, I noticed that ground beef tasted great in lots of one-pot combination dishes. We ate a LOT of ground beef as a family of several picky eaters, one heart patient, and mostly one busy cook. I also discovered that eggs tasted pretty good with stuff mixed in, starting with a can of Campbell’s cream soup, but then extending that to various other things in scrambled eggs such as cheese, mushrooms, or celery. So one summer when I was keeping house for myself I thought to extend these observations to cooking eggs and ground beef together in a frying pan along with a can of soup. It didn’t taste good at all.

On Thursday night I went to a cocktail tasting at deVine Wines. Our party gathered in honour of a birthday celebrant.  It was a lot of fun – we tasted seven cocktails, and brought home recipes, a silly souvenir drinking vessel, and whatever ingredients we bought. I feel like making cocktails at home now, except that I don’t have a shaker, and I’ve just gotten around to putting an ice cube tray in the freezer, and I don’t have a complete set of ingredients for any of the things we tried. But one or both of the drink-mixers for the event was really encouraging people to try out combinations on their own and make up names for them.

Here are my conclusions so far:
1. Cranberry liqueur from Okanagan Spirits is really good on its own. It would probably also be very good with orange juice, with ginger ale or soda, with cranberry-cocktail juice, or with champagne, but I don’t have any of those things here yet.
2. Frangelico, the hazelnut liqueur dressed up with a monk’s knotted belt around the bottle, is a bit too sweet to drink warm on its own, and it smells oddly like an old library.
3. Diet root beer and 6yo Cuban rum, while each is something I would gladly drink on its own, when mixed together have a terrible overtone or texture or something, together, like outgassing plastic. Fortunately I didn’t mix very much of it. I had thought it could be called an R&R, but now I don’t want to waste a name.
4. Adding a dribble of Frangelico to the above makes most of the weird chemical thing disappear. It actually just makes it taste like cheap pop, which may be a fake-flavour taste or may be an artificial-sweetener taste.

Conclusion: I need to buy more compatible drinks.

What foods or drinks have you discovered just don’t go together?