Yo ho ho and a bottle of...

So, I made a big ol' batch of my favorite picadillo over the weekend.

Seriously. A lot. (And white rice and black beans and plantains, too...but that's not important right now.)

We had our neighbors and friends, and of course, my mom coming for dinner and I generally don't exactly follow my own recipe per se, I just kind of make it "by ear." (De oido.)

So, I 'm just grabbing an onion here and a bell pepper there and and dicing and crushing garlic and pulling stuff out of my cupboards that I normally put in picadillo and I always keep on hand, like tomato sauce and tomato paste and white cooking wine...

Actually, it was at the "white cooking wine" part that I ran into some trouble...

There were two bottles in the cupboard and they looked like this...

I grabbed the one on the left and poured a little (well, okay...a lot...) into my picadillo.
It was the smell that gave it away. (Oops!)

So, I added some pimentón to the picadillo (to try and mask the pungent smell of rum! I know. Shut up.) and then some of the white cooking wine, which I should have added in the first place and then I was sort of adding things willy-nilly to this dish that was quickly devolving from picadillo to everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-adillo.

The good news is that it turned out pretty good. Pretty great, actually. I think I pretty much added enough stuff to mask the rum and I think I may be adding the pimentón to picadillo again in the future. =D

The bad news is that Jonathan loved this new version of picadillo so much that he had thirds...