The food just gets uglier here in the Wise household as we do our best to escape the gravitational pull of traditions. Not only did we skip the turkey, which had the knock-on effect of leaving us without leftovers, but we cooked up some dried-out six-month-old mutton that was likely dispatched in springtime, salted, and then hung in the rafters of somewhere in Norway before becoming this Scandinavian holiday favorite called Pinnekjøtt. Five pounds of funky dried sheep ribs exuding a slightly peculiar (not pleasant) cheese-like stench sat wrapped in a paper bag, stinking up our place for over a month. Before you ask, no, we didn’t seal it in a bag and risk it molding; it needs air to breathe, nor did we put it in our fridge, as it’s never been in one anyway.

Cooking it, on the other hand, that was where the experience got real. To me, it smelled like we were cooking the corpse of the infamous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who influences how I say the word Pinnekjøtt, which Caroline insists is pronounced: “PIN-neh-SHOHT.”

Enough of the semantics. First, we soaked the sheep ribs overnight. Then, we simmered them for nearly three hours. Oops, this was the first mistake, as that amount of time was meant to cook more than we were preparing. From there, I put them on our barbecue, trying to bring them to a crispiness, not the dried-out slivers of meat and charred fat we ended up with. It’s a good thing we have another three pounds that can linger in our apartment until Christmas, when we take a different approach to preparing them instead of just throwing them away while they continue insulting our olfactory.