Sausage and Booze

So I haven’t been posting a lot lately and I have several excuses ragning from laziness to work to etc… But this week I’ve actually been too busy cooking! After finishing the venison sausage earlier in the week I kept on thinking about how I could make the whole sausage thing better. It turned out that the final venison product was actually pretty good but I wasn’t extremely pleased with venison as a base.

This prompted me to try a couple of tried and true sausage bases, pork and lamb. With the pork I wanted to make one Asian inspired sausage and one pork chop inspired sausage (taking inspiration from how I like to eat pork chops.) With the lamb I tried to convert my meatball recipe into sausage form.

Pork chop sausage= Chopped granny Smith Apples, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, ground fennel and whole fennel seed with a little maple syrup

Asian Pork Sausage= Lots of Garlic, Onions, Lemon Zest, and some Sriracha

Lamb= dried Bing cherries, Pine Nuts, Mint, Garlic and Port Wine.

Upon early taste testing all three were tasty with the Asian inspired sausage being a home run. But we’ll see tonight when I feed these to people other than myself.

I also took my first stab at infusing my own liquor last night with the hopes of coming up with a few things for our BBQ cocktail list. My three experiments are as follows:

Bourbon infused with Bacon, Maple Syrup and Walnuts
Light Rum with a Grapefruit and Mint infusion
Vodka infused with Citrus and Melon.

We’ll see how they turn out.

Market Update

With the weather starting to get warmer, I was hoping for some green spring vegetables at the Greenmarket this weekend. Unfortunately, there were none to be had, and I was left to suffer another Spring weekend without any wild asparagus (I've been craving vegetables lately.)

However, I did receive some good news. The people at Mountain Sweetberry Farms had a very tiny bunch of ramps at their stand and told me that ramps, and perhaps some other spring bounty should be available next weekend. I smell a farm to table dinner coming...

I kept my spending at a minimum and made myself a Greenmarket breakfast:


Fried egg over german butterball potatoes, bacon, crosnes, apples, pea greens and mustard seed. Eggs and bacon were from Violet Hill Farms and potatoes, crosnes and pea greens were from Mountain Sweetberry.

A Comforting Easter

I returned from Mexico City on Saturday night but before I gather my thoughts on the trip, I thought I’d thank my mom for cooking lots of non-Mexican food for me on Easter Sunday.

Breakfast/Brunch started at about 11 with some delicious Kielbasa, babka, and fruit salad. There’s not a lot of meats that I like more than kielbasa and thanks to the polish half of my family it has engrained itself in my diet as a go-to comfort food, something much needed after all of the weird stuff I ate in Mexico.
After snacking on pie crust cookies (mad with lard, yum!) for the afternoon, dinner consisted of rack of lamb with a panko, garlic and rosemary crust, mushroom risotto, roasted tomatoes and asparagus with lemon. We also had a salad of bibb lettuce, marinated fennel, blood orange, and avocado with a grapefruit pistachio vinaigrette. The meal went very nicely with the ’06 Dutcher Crossing Sauvignon Blanc and the ’04 Miner Cabernet Sauvignon.

For dessert we had one of the all time favorite things that my mom and my grandmother make: Coconut Custard Pie. A very delicious end to a comforting return home.


In other new, I'm going to Momofuku Ko tonight!