Fair warning: Vegans and vegetarians should probably just skip this post.

Looks great, doesn’t it? Well, looks can be deceiving.

We had friends coming over for dinner last night. The recipe sounded wonderful. Lamb shanks, slow cooked in red wine with fresh rosemary and garlic, along with a couple of small onions, a leek, thyme, a little more garlic, mushrooms, baby carrots, and a little chicken broth. Lamp shanks aren’t cheap, but we decided to splurge. I got everything into our big, cast iron Dutch Oven mid-afternoon, put it in the oven, and prepared for the wonderful aroma to fill the house as it simmered slowly for several hours.

Instead, after it had been in the oven for about an hour, Meda and I both looked around and asked, almost in unison–“Does that smell bad, or is it just me?”

The cooks nightmare. It did smell bad. Not “bad” like totally food poisoning rotten, but “bad” like “oh, man, what is going on?” Bad like, “What do I have on hand for a Plan B menu on very short notice?”

First, though, there was the “doubt your senses” stage. After all, I don’t think I had ever cooked lamb shanks before, so I didn’t really know what they might smell like. The recipe described a wonderful smell. What we had was the wonderful smell of garlic, onion, and red wine with a sour “something’s wrong” smell wrapped around the experience.

I tried my best to recover. I had trimmed a bit of fat off the shanks before browning them, but I tried adding the juice from a fresh lemon, figuring that if the smell were from a bit of extra fat, perhaps the lemon juice would cut through it. I think it did help, marginally, which unfortunately added to the “doubt your senses” inertia.

Okay, I admit it. I made a big mistake. Instead of just shifting gears to Plan B, which I figured could be a simple pasta sauce with a little sausage and garlic, I instead thought something along the lines of “oh, it doesn’t smell quite as bad as it did earlier.”

And then, by the time our friends arrived, it was now too late to run away. So we powered through.

Meda’s salad was outstanding. We heated some peas as well as a little french bread. And that wonderful looking lamb was served over brown rice, which was a nice counterpoint to the “cooked until just falling apart” texture of the meat.

To tell the truth, it didn’t taste bad. But it was a little like the durian experience–you had to get past that off-putting smell in order to reach the not-too-bad taste of lamb.

I confess to a few furtive glances around the table to see if anyone was turning green or facing any bodily rebellion. Luckily, that didn’t happen, we made it through the meal, much of the lamb was consumed, and no one got sick.

This morning, though, Meda marched me to the refrigerator and instructed me to do an olfactory assessment of the leftovers. Short version–I don’t think we’ll be snacking on those leftovers. Instead, we’ll be letting Safeway know their “100% natural” imported lamb was officially judged to be on the wrong side of fresh.