The Dinner Files

Do you think creamy cole slaw has mayonnaise in it? I did. That’s what I thought until I was 29 and visiting my friend in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We made cole slaw and I learned that the good stuff – that creamy, luscious kind that reminds me of the little container that would come with my Kentucky Fried dinner as a kid – is actually creamy. As in, it has cream in it.

I’ll let you take a moment to recover – this comes as big news to many people who never make cole slaw. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mayonnaise-laden versions out there, but the good stuff? Cream. Heavy cream.

You mix a little bit of cream with vinegar and the acid in the vinegar thickens the cream into a dressing-like, some may say mayonnaise-like, consistency. Some celery seeds, if you like, some salt, some pepper, and maybe some sugar if you’re one of those people who like sweet cole slaw, and you have the best cole slaw ever. I posted a full recipe for Creamy Cole Slaw over at Local Foods. It only gets better if it sits in the fridge for a bit and it could serve you very well this summer if you get invited to many potlucks or barbecues or, if you live in the 1960s, “patio parties.”

I had the chance to make some cole slaw last weekend – perhaps it will fit into your weekend this week. We had a couple families over for a last-minute cook-out. I thawed a bunch of delicious homemade sausage I still had in my freezer (I’m telling you, my dashing husband’s largely vegetarian diet is really cutting into my meat consumption) and, in a last-minute moment of utter and complete panic that 21 sausages would not be enough for six adults and four children (one of whom isn’t quite two), little patties I made for the kids out of some bulk sausage I also had (upper left corner of the grill). In what world would 21 sausages not have been enough?

Indeed, we had a few sausages leftover at the end of the evening – but not as many as you’d think. Just three of the lamb sausages,* which were spiced and just the eeniest teeniest bit dry. I cut them up, sauteed them in olive oil with some garlic and spinach and a few basil leaves, tossed the whole thing with pasta shells, and topped each serving with black pepper and grated goat gouda cheese. The resulting dish was surprisingly delicious – not like leftovers at all – and I like to think demonstrated a real rise on my part to the challenge my dashing husband unwittingly made when he said, “We have a lot of food, but none of it goes together.” A sentence guaranteed to make me say, “Ha!”

* Since the kids ate the four patties, that means the six adults ate a whopping 18 sausages – that’s three a piece. Me? I had one and a half. I’m a lady.

For those of you on the East Coast or in the Midwest, just skip the next sentence or two. The last few days have been that span that tends to happen in January at least once when it is so sunny and glorious that you wonder how anyone ever could ever live anywhere else. And those who know me can tell you I am no San Francisco Bay Area booster. I know there are many other perfectly lovely places to live *and* I have my complaints about this place. But yesterday? Yesterday there was one place to live: here.

And to top it off I got to drive my ass over the Golden Gate Bridge (on a clear day, I ask you, is there anything more spectacular?) to meet up with some other maniacs who, when asked how they’d like to spend a Sunday afternoon, also answered: make sausage. To our ranks was added a chef who works out of the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, so we got to use their beautiful mess hall kitchen with plenty of counter space. A friend of mine from college was supposed to join us but had to cancel to care for a sick wife and baby, making sausage club part 2 an all-female affair:

Since this was our second go-around, we were able to develop/perfect our techniques a bit: techniques for rinsing the casings, techniques for getting the casing on the stuffing funnel, techniques for stuffing and shaping the casings evenly. And let me tell you what I’ve learned about sausage making so far: the more hand-job like the better the technique. Gentle but firm, rhythmic, smooth — even wet hands — are all key to proper sausage making.

So we gathered, joked (you can imagine), and made sausage. We had the same approach as last time: each person bring ingredients to make 4-5 lbs of a type of sausage, we all help grind and stuff, and then divide the types at the end o everyone takes home 1-2 lbs of each type of sausage. Me? I brought an even garlickier version of the Toulouse-style sausage I made last time. Lisa made some small-batch Jimmy Dean (the secret, we discovered, is a bit of sugar and approximately 1 ton of black pepper). Hope created a crazy-delicious lamb sausage (saved from the dryness of most lamb sausage by the addition of some pork fat) seasoned with plenty of toasted cumin seeds and currants. Katie super-starred by making Italian seasoned elk sausage from elk she helped hunt. Snap!

I defrosted some of the country sausage I ordered from our meat CSA yesterday. I formed it into patties, fried them up in a cast iron pan, and then made caraway-scented red cabbage in that same pan with all the yummy sausage fat in it.

To tell you the truth we’ve had some mixed thoughts about the pork we’ve received so far. Don’t get me wrong, it is delicious. The best tasting pork I’ve ever had. But it has been a bit tough, which is to be expected from an animal that lived a life in which it got to walk around the beautiful hills of West Marin. You build up some muscle doing that. The tougher meat, however, is something we’re still getting used to (part of it is figuring out how to adjust recipes – some cuts need to be cooked faster, others need more time – and I haven’t yet mastered that balancing act).

The thing about sausage, though, is it doesn’t matter much how tough that meat was before you ground it up, all you’re left with is the amazingly deep, pork-y flavor and all the almost sweet fatty juiciness. It melded quite nicely with the cabbage, too.

Ernie ate his sausage Minnesota-state-fair-style: on a stick. He speared the sausage patty with his fork, held it up, and ate from there. I knew I should stop him, because it’s not very impressive table manners. But he was being neat about it and seemed to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t say a word.

We love brussels sprouts at our house. Love them! Roasted, sauteed, steamed, and in a soup. I browned a few of the garlic sausages I made Sunday (just using smoked sausage like andouille would have worked very well too), cut them into pieces while I brought 4 cups chicken broth and about a pound of yellow finn potatoes (cut into bite-size pieces) to a boil, added a pound of trimmed and halved little brussels sprouts, 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds, and the cut-up sausage. Simmered everything until the vegetables were tender.

A few friends came over, we ground meat, rinsed intestines, and stuffed one into the other. Four of us made three kinds of sausage. I made Toulouse, or French garlic sausage. There was also an onion-sage-red wine combo and wild boar. No kidding. Wild boar hunted in Sonoma county, ground up and mixed with cumin, sherry, smoked paprika, and plenty of orange. Awesome. The advantage of group sausage making (besides multiple hands for detangling intestines, stuffing, and fetching various things with clean hands while others’ hands are pork-fat covered) is that everyone gets a share in each kind of sausage. Here’s my share:

Garlic sausage

4 1/2 lbs. pork shoulder

1 lb. pork fat

3 Tbsp. kosher salt

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

Cut pork and fat into 1-inch pieces. Toss with salt and chill overnight. Toss in garlic, pepper, and nutmeg. Grind on a 3/8-inch grinder. Chill another 15 minutes. Grind again. Stuff into hog intestines or, much easier, form into patties. Chill and use within four days or freeze for up to four months.

I cooked some of the garlic sausage for dinner (with roasted potatoes and cabbage & onions). We started with some pimentos de padron, it was a lovely Sunday supper. We ate late, after walking up to the community garden by our house. The sun had set and the garden was decorated with dozens of jack-o-lanterns. A scary scarecrow tortured delighted children in the back corner before rewarding them with candy. It was beautiful and charming and full of neighbors loving where they live.

But not just any sausage and not just any polenta. There was, yet again, sweet corn in our farm box last night. I could barely look at it. So I husked it, cut it off the cob, and stirred the kernels into a pot of polenta. I highly recommend this use for corn you don’t feel like eating but need to consume.

More interesting–to me anyway–was the sausage, pepper, onion combo I whipped up. There were some sort of sad-sack red peppers in the farm box too, so I roasted and peeled them before sauteeing them with some sliced onions and garlic in the fat rendered from cooking some sweet italian sausage and kielbasa from the sausage making party (I guess that’s what you’d have to call it) my friend and neighbor had last winter. We each brought ingredients for a variety of sausage, helped each other stuff them, and then had a great exchange. My totally awesome garlicky Toulouse-style sausage and the lovely spicy chorizo are long gone, but I put some of the other varieties in the freezer. They went very well with the polenta.

Yes, zucchini blossoms are better fried. But I can’t sit around frying things all day. And, I need more than “Fried Zucchini Blossoms” to populate the “Zucchini Blossoms” category on Local Foods. So zucchini blossom omelet it is. And you know what? It was pretty damn good, especially considering that it was so hot out that all I wanted was a nice big bowl of ice for dinner.

Plus, Ernie chopped the zucchini blossoms. He did not, however, care much for the omelet. What he liked were the Italian sausages I bought from Boccalone* and cooked up to put in his lunch. He liked those a lot. He actually sat on the kitchen floor near the stove to just be there and smell them cooking. And that is how he understood and described his own actions. “Mama,” he said, “I just want to sit here and smell this delicious smell.”

Fair enough.

*Boccalone has a salami CSA, which is pretty awesome. But you know what is really awesome? They sell “salumi cones” at Ferry Plaza–large slices of mortadella and pate formed into a cone and filled with slices of salami. Um, yeah. I thought so too: That’s genius.

You know what brats are, right? Bratwurst. Hard to find in much of the country,* brats are ubiquitous in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There are plenty of bad brats out there, but even bad ones are pretty damn tasty. And just the thought of a good one (like those sold at Clancy’s Meats in Linden Hills in Minneapolis) makes those saliva glands back behind my molars go crazy. Like most people, I like mine with good mustard, some sauerkraut if I can get it, and a cold beer.

What I only recently discovered, however, is the harmonious perfection of a brat on a RYE bun. Of course! It’s so obvious! How have I ever eaten them any other way?

* In California, for example, people will actually try and sell you bockwurst as bratwurst, telling you it is the same thing. It is not: bockwurst is a mild ground veal sausage that looks like a long hot dog, bratwurst is a fat spiced ground pork sausage–traditionally a bit of veal is thrown in too, but not in modern U.S. versions

My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last night. They got married when they were young and foolish and it was July 3. They have tried to have romantic anniversary celebrations. But the nation’s holiday gets in the way. The entire family is at the cabin, the sun is out, the lake is warm, there is summer time fun to be had, and, this year, their daughter and grandson came to visit.

So they opened a bottle of champagne to have with the sausages we threw on the grill and made jokes about 40 More Years. We should all be so lucky to have 40 years look like this:

My Very Tall Cousin Sam came to dinner last night. The evening was marked by two big events. First, Ernie let go a bit too soon while showing off on his trapeze for Sam. He gashed his head on the pea gravel and bled profusely. Sam, who was in town for a job interview, carried Screaming Ernie up the back stairs to the kitchen trying simultaneously to comfort the child and, understandably, not to get blood all over his nice clothes. Once we got the blood cleaned up we all realized the cut was small. Ernie was back outside with Very Tall Cousin Sam within three minutes.

Second, I perfected the spring vegetable couscous (cuckoo!) that has haunted me lo! these many days. We ate it with grilled peppers and spicy Italian sausage from Boccalone, a cured meat CSA in the Bay Area (what won’t they think of next…).