A “spin liquid” is a novel phase of matter where the spins fail to order in the ground-state/low-temperature phase. The Kitaev spin liquid is one such example arising from an exactly solvable honeycomb lattice Hamiltonian with direction-dependent Ising interactions. Remarkably, not long after, it was demonstrated that the Kitaev model may be realized in certain compounds, and thus the search for a Kitaev spin-liquid material began. Due to the exact solubility, many experiments are compared directly to the Kitaev model despite other competing interactions in the effective spin Hamiltonian. To overcome this issue, we introduce a technique that can provide approximate results on Hamiltonians within the Kitaev phase allowing us to predict the outcome of e.g. inelastic neutron scattering experiments on realistic Kitaev spin liquid candidates. I will additionally discuss my proposal to engineer a small-system analog of a Kitaev spin liquid in a quantum simulator as a controlled platform to explore such physics.