Yummy, yummy ostrich

One of the things that I do as part of Weight Watchers is cook the vast majority of our meals myself. We don't go out to eat nearly as often as we used to, and when we eat at home, I almost always cook. It's kind of counterintuitive because Torsten is actually a better cook than I am, but his style of cooking is very improvisational, and usually involves a lot of butter, cream, and oil. He isn't so much into the whole following of recipes thing, and that's pretty crucial when you're carefully tracking everything you eat.

So, I do most of the cooking. Back when I started Weight Watchers I used only their recipes and I followed them to the letter. Now that I've become much more comfortable cooking and have learned a lot more about what's healthy in general, it's easier for me to improvise without doubling the calories in a dish, and I can just scan the ingredients in any recipe and get a quick understanding of approximately how many points are in a serving.

However, we still get stuck in cooking ruts, where we just sort of rotate among a few recipes. For awhile it was rosemary seared beef with mozzarella rice salad, spaghetti, pad thai, and spinach enchiladas. But slowly we'd get sick of certain dishes and start adding new recipes to the mix. Our current rotation includes Thai coconut chicken, a modified beef stroganoff, shrimp and goat cheese pasta, and beef lo mein.

Last night I made the lo mein, except that I decided to mix things up a little bit (perhaps a sign that the lo mein is on its way out?) by using ostrich meat instead of beef. I had never had ostrich before, but they sell it at our grocery store and it's supposed to be very lean and healthy, so I figured I'd try it, and Torsten, who has eaten ostrich burgers before, agreed enthusiastically.

I would say that I'm a reasonably adventurous eater, and I'll try pretty much anything unless I already know that I don't like it, but usually that happens in restaurants or at someone else's house. I cook all different types of cuisines but the varying flavors are usually in the sauce, not the actual meat. We eat lots of chicken and seafood and lean beef, but that's about it as far as meat variety goes.

I don't know what it is about ostrich--it actually looks and tastes a lot like beef. Maybe it's because beef isn't called "cow" and I'm so desensitized to the word "chicken" that I don't even think about the actual animal anymore, but somehow calling the meat "ostrich" just made me imagine those giant, mean birds with their nasty, beady eyes (and yes ostriches ARE nasty). It was very bizarre to be cutting it up and cooking it right there in my kitchen.

But, as it turns out? Ostrich is delicious. Seriously, we both liked the lo mein way better with the ostrich meat than we did with the beef. It was more flavorful and you could actually taste the flavor in the sauce, which you couldn't really with the beef. It was so good! It made me think that I need to start branching out a bit more with the types of food that I cook.

So tell me, what are your cooking habits? Do you tend to cook the same few dishes over and over? What's the most adventurous thing that you've ever cooked?