Salvadoran sausage: a work in progress?

I bought a package of "Chorizo Salvadoreno Hot Cuscatleco." Produced by Alimentos de Mi Tierra.

This company is based in the Bronx, New York, and has a distribution center in Miami, Fla.

It's a pork sausage and ingredients include onions, scallions, celery, salt, vinegar, paprika, cilantro, chili pepper and liquid smoke.

It looks like a Texas-style kielbasa link sausage. It is lightly ground pork, which is to say it is not so processed that the meat appears homogeneous. But it's not as clean as Texas pork sausage. Split it open and you find the gristle is close to 30 percent of content.

Cross section cut of Salvadoran sausage

I conducted several experiments with this sausage, none of them terribly successful. I first tried grilling it whole. This sausage smells great when you grill it. But once you bite into it, I can't say it lives up to the first impression.

You can forget the veggies in the ingredients. They are hardly noticeable. What is overpowering is the liquid smoke and paprika. It's too strong. And eaten straight, it's pretty salty.

I first served it up with yellow saffron Spanish rice, black beans and ripe avocado. It was okay, but I didn't think this was an experience I wanted to repeat.

Trouble is, I had a whole pack of this to consume. Hmmm?

Salvadaoran sausage with yellow rice, red beans

I repeated the same dish with a few minor variations. One plate included peas and carrots in the rice. Another plate was consumed without avocado. All of them okay, none of them great.

One test I have with link sausage is it should be edible for breakfast, lunch or dinner. What makes it a breakfast sausage versus a dinner sausage is more about the sides that go with it. But this Salvadoran sausage just wasn't something I could envision as a breakfast sausage.

My last effort was to make it a breakfast sausage. Now aware that the liquid smoke and paprika and salt were the challenge, I tried diffusing their flavors by dicing the sausage fine and cooking it in shallow water with fresh chopped onion, poblano and two dried mora peppers (a smoked, dried jalapeno).

I boiled off some of the water and I didn't add any salt; seriously, didn't need it.

Cracked two eggs, and stirred them in. I heated up my usual portion of white corn tortillas and made some refried red beans. What I had in mind was using the beans as a spread in the tortilla, the heaping the sausage, egg, veggies in as the main filling.

For a beverage, I had a Cuban coffee with ground cinnamon.

Morning breakfast looked pretty good.

Again, it was palatable. But the liquid smoke and paprika continued to dominate. This is an acquired taste, at least for me.

Even with the egg and tortilla, it really doesn't pass muster as a breakfast item. I might have it on occasion for dinner, but these recipes are a work in progress.

I'm not a fan of liquid smoke. If you're not going to smoke it in a traditional way, then you should probably leave it out. It is a spicy sausage, which I like, but there are other ways to make a hot sausage that come together better than this.

And the gristle is noticeable. All in all, I have to give this sausage a thumbs down.

Fideo sangrado (bloody fideo), or when you want hot to look it

Fideo Sangrado

You're looking at spicy. This is more than "kick it up a notch."

It isn't blow out your eardrums and call the fire department hot, but it's in the red zone.

I've been experimenting with beets. I like them. And I can understand why some folks don't. They can be pretty earthy tasting. On the other hand, their pungency is a welcome improvement over dried soybeans that are being marketed as a snack.

Excuse me, but dry roasted edamame (soybeans) isn't a snack. These are capsules of dirt. Dry, tasteless, choke-me-and-die! dirt tablets.

But I digress. I am trying to do with beets what other people try to do with tofu (a slightly more palatable soy-based invention than edamame). But I have more to work with because, guess what?, beets actually taste like something.

Yes, this is a bit radical. And I know, traditionally, fideo is like Mexican chicken soup. It's usually fideo in a chicken broth-based soup. Pardon, for those who may ask, what is fideo?, this is a Hispanic spaghetti, or short-stemmed type of spaghetti.

What I'm aiming for here is a kind of hot, hearty soup - something filling to eat on a cold day. I had a few of those here in south Florida last week; yes, actually inspired me to go out and by a light coat.

I love how beets turn the water a deep purple-red. But I don't want my fideo to taste like beets. I want my fideo to have a more full-bodied taste. Go for it!

Boiling 2 1/2 cups of water (because that's how much water my little package of fideo said to use), adding four cubes of Knorr Cilantro Mini Cubes seasoning, chop a beet (I say a beet because I had a really, really big beet in the fridge; you may want to use two or three), and boil.

Nothing hot about that, yet! We'll have to fix that. Two Kiolbassa smoked beef with jalapeno sausages, one serrano pepper - slice up both and toss them in the soup. Grab the paprika and shake in vigorously; just keep shaking it in there for close to a minute.

And grab the crushed red pepper, shake that in for another minute.

Now, I boiled the fideo for about 12 minutes (as per package instructions), and it didn't look right. I suppose I could have stopped boiling. It was cooked. But the chunks of beets were so much larger, I had a 'presentation' problem. So, I over-boiled and got the fideo a lot thicker than it needed to be.

And that's how I ended up with the picture above. Visually, the fideo sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the beets and sausage, rather than looking like some puny minor ingredient. Well, it is called fideo sangrado!

As it boiled, I tasted it and ended up adding a little extra salt. I always try to be conservative with the salt shaker. It turned out great, to my taste. But you may want to go easier on the heat ingredients; I was trying to peel paint with this stuff.

Buen provecho!

Off the shelf cuisine does not include laundry in the microwave

I like sardines. There, I said it.

Apparently, some people have a problem with that. Back in my police beat reporter days, mid-1990s, one of my favorite on-the-go meals was a microwaveable black bean soup. I opened the top, poured in the water. I opened a can of sardines packed in olive oil and scraped the sardines into the soup, threw it in the microwave.

I thought this was delicious ... still do. But I had to microwave this concoction in the news room and therein lay the problem. After several months -- it might have been a year or more -- of keeping this on my menu, the night shift chief copy editor got up one day and loudly asked if I was drying my socks in the microwave.

It had been raining. I did come in wet. But I had not dried my socks in the microwave and we got to the point of his complaint. He didn't like the smell of sardines coming out of the microwave. I would have dismissed him right then and there, but he got a few "amens!" from the peanut gallery.

So, in the interest of good workplace relations, I reluctantly dropped black bean soup with sardines from my repertoire. But I haven't given up on sardines.


Seafood, sausage and spicy seasonings are a popular combination in some Cajun dishes. That's where I'm trying to steer with this dish. The basic idea being how to throw together something of ingredients that are handy in a pinch.

This isn't a traditional dish. I'll call this one Cajun Pasta.

What tends to happen in a kitchen. You buy dry or canned good because they keep a long time and you don't have to worry about them spoiling. But they tend to stack up over time and your cupboard gets full. Okay, I'm not saying that happens to ME, but I've seen it happen.

So, I'm driving home. I want pasta. But I want something kind of Cajun. Hmm? A hybrid Cajun-Italian dish.  How am I going to pull this off?

Going through the cupboard, I find a bag of No Yolks Cholesterol Free Egg White Pasta and a can of sardines packed in olive oil. In the fridge is some beef smoked sausage and a tomato-based pasta sauce in a jar.

This is too easy! Boil the noodles with a little salt. Chop the beef sausage real fine -- you want small bits -- grill it. Put the pasta sauce in a bowl with the sardines and microwave. Drain your pasta, throw it on a dish.

Stir the sausage into the sauce and sardines and spread this over the pasta. Sprinkle ground black pepper and crushed red pepper liberally (liberally! Trust me; it's the seafood-sausage mix with black and red peppers that makes this ala Cajun).
And serve!

Cajun Pasta anyone?

Buen provecho!

Meat & veggies, meat & veggies, go together like a horse & carriage

In another life, dropping in at a downtown Pik Nik Foods in San Antonio was almost a daily routine.

These hole-in-the-wall convenience stores have kitchens and the cook is always keeping watch over a series of deep, heated serving trays with all kinds of ingredients for tacos to order. One of the standard items is 'pollo con calabasa,' or chicken with squash.

One of the sloppier selections, pollo con calabasa has some soupy water that leaks out of the aluminum foil and makes the brown paper bag sag. But I can live with that!

Mexican food frequently involves mixing vegetables with a meat, or meats with a vegetable. I like to pair a couple of meats, instead of just using one. It makes for a more nuanced flavor.

This dish takes one chayote squash, one poblano pepper and a sliver of cabbage (about 16th section of a head). Chop, chop, chop it all! And throw it in an open pot. Add about a half cup of water, two Knorr Cilantro Mini Cubes for seasoning and some pepper.

Bring this to a boil, stir occasionally and reduce the water until there is barely any left, but don't let it burn.

In a separate pan, drop in your choice of chopped meat sausages (I used two links of Kiolbassa Jalapeño Beef Smoked Sausage from San Antonio), and one link of Mexican chorizo (I used Supremo Pork Chorizo Links from Chicago).

Kiolbassa sausage:

Mash the chorizo and break it up. Stir the jalapeño-infused beef sausage. Once this is all running its grease, toss in the veggies and stir some more. This is a hot dish, spicier than what I usually suggest. If that's a problem for you, replace the poblano with a red or yellow bell pepper.

You should end up with this. The chayote squash looks a little like potato wedges in a photograph, but it tastes like squash. One chorizo link doesn't make much meat for two, and this recipe makes two meals, but that's not the intent. The beef sausage links are what fill you up, and the chorizo adds to the flavor.

I had the first meal with four grilled white corn tortillas. Tortillas come out of the bag semi-cooked. They have too much moisture. I grill them on a comal with a little butter into they have a slight leathery texture to them. That makes them perfect vessels for holding the filling, and they're still soft.

I put the rest in the fridge and had it the following day with an avocado. Costeno cheese was sprinkled lightly on both meals.


Here's the second serving:

Sausages with veggies and avocado

Buen provecho!

This is "country" (as in country gumbo, country tacos)

Went out for lunch this past week with the boss. We went to the Shuck 'N Dive on Federal Highway, and no they don't have their own website, either. So, you get this generic link.

If I knew they weren't going to have a website, I would've taken pictures of something besides my bowl of 'country gumbo,' but it's a nice Cajun-style joint with the bar in the middle of the room. This is south Florida, so they had outdoor seating, too, but it was a warm day and Eddie was in a suit so we sat inside at the bar (all the tables were taken).

The walls are covered to the last square inch with trappings from Louisiana: a lot of NFL Saints and LSU momentos. There's paintings that harken to Mardi Gras. You're getting the picture.

Like I said, I ordered a country gumbo. The description on the menu seemed a little off. It consisted of pulled pork, Andouille sausage and okra, and rice in a Cajun spiced rue.

Well, gumbo is normally a seafood soup with okra, shrimp, crab and oysters. It's common for gumbo to include crawdads (crayfish). Then there's chicken gumbo (okra and chicken).

What I got barely had any soup in it. It was a stew and it had a lot of rice. The Andouille was sliced thin. The 'soup' was a reddish, peppery, spicy liquid. It was tasty. It could have used more okra, which was there more for decoration than nourishment.

COUNTRY GUMBO AT THE SHUCK 'N DIVE

All in all, it was alright and reasonably priced. Reasonably priced is something you don't come across often in Fort Lauderdale, so I don't knock it.

The "county" label on the gumbo, I'm sure, had to do with including sausage in the mix. Same thing happens in Texas with tacos. If the cook uses chopped Polish or German sausage with the eggs and tucks this into a taco, you are getting a "country taco."

I threw together a country taco plate this morning. I chopped poblano and serrano peppers with onion and lightly grilled. The pepper doesn't usually go into a country taco at the restaurant, but then again, I wasn't getting a hot sauce; so this was my substitute.

Chop a link of Kiolbassa beef sausage, stir in a couple of eggs, and you've got enough fixings to fill four tacos. Now all I need is a cup of coffee!

Buen provecho!

Extreme multi-tasking: Be the Cook

I agreed to cook for co-worker Julie Kay's birthday. Since I had never cooked for a party before, I had to ramp up more than the quantity of ingredients.

The night of the event was intense. But I was in some kind of zone. The only thing I burned was a tortilla! Considering everything I was orchestrating, that's kind of amazing. I was stirring shrimp in chili sauce in a sauce pan, making rice, making a noodle-slaw salad, grilling brats, keeping an eye on the chicken pot, warming up molé in a crock-pot, flipping tortillas on a hot comal.

But all of this got started at the start of the week.

I sat down a few times to make lists, estimate times, figure out the coordinating steps I would need to perform to pull this off. I had a brief stint as a short-order cook in a Dallas diner in my late teens. I was awful.

This was going to have to come together better, but I had more experience. We expected 15 people and I wanted three entreés and some sides. I started cooking Friday: boiling chicken, separating the broth to make the molé, boiling potatoes.

The chicken molé involved buying chicken and buying a jar of Doña Maria molé. There would be shrimp in a spicy sauce, so I had to get the ingredients for a chili paste.

And just in case I had any folks who had problems with seafood, or who didn't want anything as exotic as an Aztec gravy on their chicken, I brought along Kiolbassa polish sausages and a can of sauerkraut.

As you can see, the sausage went over well.

This was all that was left -->

 The sides. I chopped beets and boiled them. I chopped plantain, but it wasn't as ripe as I had hoped. I've tried this before and it came out great. Grill the plantain in butter then add it to the boiled beats with salt and hot sauce. They turned out okay on this occasion, but the flavor wasn't what I was aiming for. Rats!

I was pairing the beet-plantain side with the chicken molé. I paired the spicy shrimp with a white rice that was cooked with cilantro.

Recipe for the shrimp: http://www.carmensdelacalle.com/recipes.html

I didn't follow the recipe, though. I took the ingredients for the chili paste and threw them in the blender. I was supposed to boil them in water, the sauteé the shrimp in the boiled chili paste. What I ended up doing was boiling water at the party and mixing the paste into that with the shrimp. We ended up with boiled spicy shrimp over rice. It was still pretty good!

There was also a Ramen noodle slaw that I whipped together. Got requests for the recipe. Chop cabbage. Crush noodles and sprinkle them on a cookie sheet with sliced almond and pumpkin seed. Toast in the oven for a minute. Mix the shrimp sauce packets from the noodle packages in vegetable oil, and pour this over the cabbage. Throw in the toasted noodles/almonds/pumpkin seed and add sesame seed. Toss and serve.

I made a Texas-style cornbread. Ingredients included chopped poblano pepper, cream-style corn, graded cheddar cheese.

I made a decent potato salad to go with the sausage and sauerkraut, but honestly, it was overkill. Nobody touched it. There was plenty to eat.

I took over the kitchen, which was really small. So when everything was ready, I had them line up at the door and hand me their plate and tell me what they wanted.

Chaos on the kitchen? No. But I crammed stuff onto every inch of counter space I had.

The party was in Miami and I live in Delray Beach, so all the prepped stuff and ingredients had to go in the trunk and make a 50-mile journey before I could set up again in a kitchen for the home-stretch.

We finished off the shrimp and rice and made a respectable dent in all that chicken.

I'd like to try doing something like this again. It was hard work, but it was fun.

Buen provecho!

Who wants to make meatballs? Not me.

I bought this Italian sausage. -->

It's made by Morrison Meat Packers in Miami, Fla.

If you're not Italian (I'm not), and you're from Texas (I am/or was), the only place you've seen Italian sausage is on a pizza.

But I wanted pasta, with store-bought Italian pasta sauce. And I didn't want to make beef meatballs.

I know. A lot of people don't have a problem with beef, or with making beef meatballs. I just never was fascinated with ground beef - don't like the smell. And why bother adding all the Italian spices if you can get a meat that already has them?

So, I decided to try this sausage. I cooked it on the grill, mashed it into bits and boiled my pasta in a pot. I was hungry so I didn't want to get too imaginative. Let's eat, already!

I put some Winn Dixie Fra Diavolo Spicy Pasta Sauce in a bowl and heated it in the microwave, opened a can of whole, pitted black olives. That was it and this is what it looks like:

Yes, I could have sliced or mashed up the olives, but I didn't want to. Okay?! Call it the little kid in me, but I love munching on olives, so I left them whole so that I would CONTEMPLATE the olive as I ate it.

Remember when you were a little kids and stuffed your mouth with Bazooka Bubble Gum? It's like that.

I had this with a cheap Chilean red wine called Carta Vieja. I have a fondness for Chilean reds.

Buen provecho!

Real meat, Real smoke, Real sausage

This may possibly be too much food

My weakness, when cooking, is adding too many things to the entreé.

The hungrier I am, the more I think about putting stuff on the stove.

Look at this mess! The photograph doesn't do it justice, because photos are two-dimensional. It's hard to get the Himalayan-esque perspective on this heap of potatoes.

I used three small potatoes. Just for me.  If I had four potatoes, I would have used four.

But I didn't have four potatoes. I did, however, have a ripe plantain. So i threw that in, too. I am sure that at some point, Jiminy Cricket chirped in and said, "What are you doing?!"

"I can't look!" Jiminy Cricket

The potatoes: I boiled water with salt and hot sauce (your choice). Once the water was boiling, I added chopped potatoes and chopped poblano. Ground in some pepper and sprinkled in some dried basil. A little more salt.

The plantain was sliced and grilled separately on a grill that shared space with Kiolbassa Beef & Cheddar Smoked Sausage - "Real Meat, Real Smoke, Real Sausage."

See the made in Texas logo? "Go Texan" - most anything made in Texas has that logo somewhere on the packaging. I like to split the sausage sideways. That bleeds out more of the grease. Since it's sprinkled with cheddar cheese, a little cheese melts and burns into the grill, but there's plenty of grease so it doesn't stick too hard. Clean-up's simple enough.

Not yet available in Florida  :(

When I piled all the food on the plate, I told myself, I'll eat it until I'm full and put the rest away. That seems to work in the restaurant.

I ate the whole thing.

I took a break from sausage meals for four days. Last night I decided to have another serving of this same sausage.

Fortunately, I was clean out of potatoes. And I was out of plantains.
But I had boiled up a bunch of red beans in a crock pot the night before. I was going for something a lot simpler. I was trying to be a purist. Sausage and beans with a beer. The red beans were just cooked with salt and a few pork rinds. I grilled two sausage links and  laid them over a serving of re-heated red beans.

I chopped up fresh cold onions and sliced off a small block of cotija cheese and liberally sprinkled that on top. It doesn't show up in the picture, but I had this with one slice of toasted multi-grain bread.

Simple. Tasty. Texan.

Texas beef sausage and red beans

Buen provecho!

Sausage of the cruel and ironic kind: who gets the shaft?

Please connect the point to the fletching

I voted this weekend, as in early voting, in Florida.

The actual experience pretty much fits the national stereotype of voting in Florida.

Palm Beach County only opened 10 locations. Mind you, this county has a population of 1.3 million people. TEN locations. From the moment I got in line until I left, I was in line for 2 hours, 35 minutes.

On my feet, at Delray Beach City Hall, Halloween weekend. Yea?

Just before I get to the voting room, I'm handed a clipboard with a form: fill out the top three lines.

Name, address, date of birth.

Once in the voting room, I sit in front of a volunteer with a laptop. He takes my voter's info and sends me to the blue tape in the middle of the room. Stand here.

I get handed a paper ballot. Two big pieces of paper, (they don't do electronic in Florida).

Of course. What else is new?

I'm okay with the long wait. I don't get that a county this big just provides 10 locations, but I'm in good health. Some citizens gave up, they couldn't deal with the wait.

So, two paper ballots. And I'm looking at these ballots for the first time. I did my research. I knew how I was going to vote. I just didn't have the actual mechanics down.

There's a black marker pen. And beside each candidate and referendum is the point of an arrow (the head), and the fletching. The middle is missing.

You make your choice by making the shaft. The symbolism was so immediately apparent to me that I thought to myself, "You have got to be kidding me. Is this a joke?"

Yes, maybe I'm reading too much into this. I get that. Still.

Jesus!

So, I got on Twitter, and I came up with this haiku:

"Early voting in Delray Beach FL. 2.5 Hrs, paper ballot. Method: Link point of arrow to fletching. U make the shaft! Need I say more?"

It just seems so symbolically sinister that I thought this had to be deliberate design, like George Carlin was given the responsibility of designing the ballot. He would get it!

Who am I making the shaft for? Given the fact that I'm already hopelessly skeptical about the usefulness of the whole voting process?

Am I giving someone the shaft?

Am I giving myself the shaft?

This feels like being directed to dig your own grave.

Heating up Halloween

I took a walk into downtown Delray Beach today and quickly realized that I left my cell phone back at the condo, this flash of recollection occuring right when I saw a mother pushing baby carriage, mom dressed in full Xena Warrior Princess costume.

Yes, I'm serious.

There were so many things I wanted to take a picture of, for instance the Atlantic Ocean from the public beach at Delray Beach at the end of Altantic Avenue. It turns out Delray Beach has a very nice public beach.

I guess the name of the town gave it away, but I was still surprised.

Before the adults take over (driving your car this close to the beach after 3 p.m. is a challenge), the day time is the right time for the kiddies. All the boutique shops that line Atlantic Avenue - leading to and away from the Halloween festival at Veteran's Park - give out candy. And the kids get more candy at the festival.

My one other indelible encounter with Halloween day mommies was the oriental mom I passed on the sidewalk who with daughter in tow - inquiring as to when she could eat candy and which candy - and mom in full zombie-robot monotone voice said:

E A T   O N E

E A T

L  O  L  L  I  P  O  P

You had to be there, but it was scary. I am a wuss around frazzled Halloween mothers.

As the day wears on, the boutique shops run out of candy, or the hired help tires of giving candy, and little white paper signs get taped to the entrance with phrases like: "We are out of candy," or "No more candy," or "Get your own damn candy!"

Made up the last one.

I would like to say I found something great to eat. There are so many cafés near the beach. But like every place else down here the food is overpriced. The nicer places were asking in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 for a meal with drink and tip. I ended up at Doc's All American, a locally famous burger/hot dog/gyro/fish sandwich place.

I went for a patty melt combo that involved a hamburger patty with cheese and grilled onion, mushrooms on Texas toast, with fries and a small soda for $8.18. Maybe it was the phrase 'Texas toast' that swayed me, but that sounded like an appetizing deal meal!

But there is a little sign by the cashier window that explains meat is cooked well-done because they don't want to risk giving you an e-coli infection.

Turns out that means they are going to char-black burn your frickin patty. Yeah! And the Texas toast is literally put in a toaster. It's not grilled on butter.

And that small soda. This ain't Texas. When they say small here, they really mean it!

There is no indoor seating at Doc's All American. The burger joint has a big blue cabana cover and plastic tables and chairs and people are fine with it. In fact, everywhere you go on this touristy section of Atlantic Avenue, there is outdoor seating.

Enough about that. The meal I did enjoy today was this morning in my kitchen. Since I started this blog, I haven't really got into spicy hot dishes. Some of the previous meals had poblano pepper ingredients, but poblano is usually mild (sometimes you'll get a really hot one - not often).

I'm laying out a serrano pepper here with onion and tomato; these three get chopped fine on the cutting board. There is some Herdez Salsa Verde, a Mexican chorizo (that Los Cerritos brand of unknown origin), and two eggs.

Should you have occasion to see a taco menu board, the most items you're likely to find with Mexican chorizo ingredients is three. This would be chorizo with eggs, chorizo with potato, and chorizo with beans.

I'm making chorizo with eggs. But my mama taught me to eat my veggies and I never cared for the plain chorizo with eggs. It is customary to get a small plastic cup condiment size serving of hot green sauce with your tacos and I usually used it on the chorizo and eggs.

And since I'm in the kitchen and I'm not limited to that, I'm adding onion, serrano and tomato. These three ingredients go in the hot skillet with butter. I want to stir them until the onion starts to brown just at the edges. This length of time also helps bring out and spread the heat from the serrano.

Then I add the chorizo and mash and stir it in to mix with the garden goods. I poured the salsa verde over this mess and started cracking open eggs. Once the egg cooks through, swish it all over to your plate.

Hot peppers are a little unpredictable. The serranos I have today are mild. Sometimes, they're really hot. If you're not into a lot of heat, you might want to chop half of a pepper and leave the rest for another day. Mine was enough to add some heat to the meal, but I didn't really notice it until I started into the second taco. It can take awhile for the effect to kick in, which is a good sign it's not going to be too strong.


A word about chorizo, salsa and salt. Chorizo has salt and so does salsa. Don't add salt. In fact, go light on the salsa. And you may notice I usually use chorizo as an ingredient. To me, it's a meat and a seasoning. Like I said before, a little goes a long ways.

A tip on heating tortillas. I put a small sliver of butter on the hot spot where they'll get warmed. I take the three or four tortillas I'm going to heat and lightly, quickly swipe each side of each tortilla over the melted butter.

Otherwise, you put the first tortilla on your heat and it soaks up all the butter. If they all get swiped first before you go back and heat them, none stick to the surface and they all heat evenly.

A hot, hearty, Halloween breakfast

Buen provecho!

Los Tres Chanchitos (The Three Little Pigs)

Mmmm! I am so glad I made enough for seconds. I'm taking my leftovers to the office tomorrow for lunch.

When's the last time you said that?

I call this The Three Little Pigs because I use three kinds of pork. There's a slice of pork loin here getting diced into little cubes. We have some Murciana Brand Chorizo Nica, and pork rinds.

A word about pork rinds and Mexicans. This is not just a snack food. A lot of Mexican cafés that serve up a respectable taco menu have chicharròn on the menu board. Chicharròn is Spanish for pork rinds.

You'll find a big steel bowl of it swimming in a tomato sauce, often with some jalapeños thrown in.

In this dish, the pork rinds are not going to skate around the skillet with the pork loin and Nicaraguan sausage. They'll be helping out the sweet potato.

Sweet potato, a Native American staple, is one of these foods that has an edginess to it. It can get a little too sweet and a little too bitter when its cooked. I want to round out its taste so it will go better with the two grilled pork meats.

I dice a sweet potato and put it in a pot with a clove of finely chopped garlic, salt, pepper, butter, some chopped ancho flake and just enough water to cover the bottom to about a half-inch. Cover the sweet potato and turn up the heat.

No pork rinds, yet. Just leave the pork rind bag on the counter. Okay, you can munch on a few, but don't ruin your appetite.

Hmm, how can pork rinds ruin your appetite? Worthy of debate.

Here's a look at some of our raw ingredients:

Now for the two meats. butter a hot skillet. Brown your piggies. Pour in a handful of pepitas (unsalted pumpkin seed), and stir. Open a can of Herdez Salsa Verde and pour in enough to get the whole skillet wet. Add a little salt and stir.

You don't need much salt, if any, with the meat. That Chorizo Nica should be enough. But I added a little.

Once cooked, take your meat off the heat.

Now about that sweet potato. If it's diced well, a little water will steam cook through fairly quick. Maybe 10 minutes? Check on it, don't let it go dry and don't add much water. Mash it into something like mashed sweet potato, pour in a couple handfuls of pork rind, put the lid on and leave it on the heat for one more minute.

You just want to soften the pork rinds to where they're a little rubbery.

Couple your sweet potato with the two pork meats on a plate. Now you've got Three Little Pigs. And that sweet potato is going to go very well with the two-meat entreé.

I don't normally suggest what drink to pair meals with, because I drink a dark beer with just about everything. But if I were choosing a wine, I'd suggest a dry white.

The Three Little Pigs

Buen Provecho!

The force of G-cubed: Gorditas, Grease and Garlic

Not being Nicaraguan, and being too lazy to research their food, I picked up a package of Murciana Brand Chorizo Nica and guess-timated how it should be prepared.

Again, there's no link. Murciana Brand leads me to a web domain page. They never bothered. What is it with Floridian sausage shops and this aversion with the Internet? The packaging says it comes from Opa-locka, which is in Miami-Dade County.

Arepas are big in Florida. The arepa is something like the Mexican gordita, a corn meal-based patty that is stuffed with fixins. But the arepas of Florida originate from Cuba, Columbia and Venezuela and they're grilled and they're straight-up cornmeal.

A gordita is made with masa harina. It's just a fat tortilla. And it's either deep fried, pan fried or just heated dry on a comal. And the only time you stuff it with something is if you deep fry it, because that's the only way to puff it out enough to split it open and stuff something in.

For this meal, I'm pan-frying these babies.

Here is a row of raw masa gorditas on their way to the hot oil. A couple of these are going to end up at the bottom of my dinner dish, covered with some Nicaraguan sausage, egg, sliced poblano pepper, garlic and cotija cheese.

Ever once in awhile, I want to lay on the garlic heavy. I chopped a clove and grilled it in with the poblano and chorizo.

This chorizo is more like Kiolbassa Chorizo in that it can take the heat. I left in for awhile and it didn't shrink or burn. I wanted to see how much heat it could handle and it held up nice.

I was serving for one, so I used two links and one egg. Once the spatula had passed the meal to the plate, heaping my grease, garlic and company atop the gorditas, I crumbled on a generous serving of fresh, cold cotija cheese.

Add no salt. You don't need it. Doesn't need anything else. You get a little heat from the poblano strips, but not much. The sausage, garlic and cotija bring all the seasoning and aroma this meal needs. By the way, this is a good sausage. Now if they could just crank up a useful website.

Buen provecho.

As in comedy, timing helps

Other than eggs, the most common ingredient a Mexican chorizo gets paired with is the potato. I don't know how long this has been going on, but the potato originated in Peru and Spaniards brought chorizo from Spain.

 Yeah, it's been awhile.

I've seen papa con chorizo (potato and sausage) tacos on the menu in taquerìas since forever. I was never a big fan. I just have to have another vegetable in that taco. And egg. Yeah, I need egg.

Okay, before this turns into the scene from The Jerk where Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) can't stop grabbing stuff as he is cast out from his mansion, I'll get to the point.

Since ingredients cook at different speeds under the same heat, you don't just throw all your ingredients onto the skillet at the same time. First, heat the skillet. It takes awhile for it to get hot enough to use. And pour in vegetable oil.

I usually cook with butter, but veggie oil works better with potatoes. Now chop what you're going to use, and in this case that's potato, poblano pepper and onion.

Peak at the picture. It's allowed.

The potatoes are nearest the skillet because they're going in first. It takes them a little longer to cook through. About a minute after you turn them over once, toss in the poblano. And a minute later, in goes the onion.

 The chorizo goes next and that you'll slowly skate around in the hot oil for no more than two minutes. The final ingredient is the eggs. Scramble them in and scramble them with the other ingredients.

From the time you started to the time you move it all to a plate, you shouldn't have let more than eight minutes pass. That will leave it at just the right moisture (yes, you can dry it out leaving it on the fire longer but why. WHY?!).

About the time you moved in the chorizo, you should've started juggling corn tortillas over a second heat source. That way everything is ready at the same time.

Timing!

Of course it tastes great!

 

 

 

Oh, I had an extra picture which has nothing whatsoever to do with this. Doesn't have anything to do with chorizo or sausage, either. But this is what I fixed up for dinner:

This is something like a hearty beef with peas and carrots, married to cooked plantain and chopped poblano pepper. Nothing sweet here. The plantain had just turned yellow so it was more like the poe-tah-toe it gets passed for in some cultures. I grilled it with poblano, skating them together in the skillet to give it a slight heat and peppery feel. That was the easy part.

What's on the left, I wouldn't have bothered trying to make in one night but I had leftovers. I had leftover beef tongue that had cooked in a crock pot and leftover molé from a chicken molé meal I'd had a ways back.

Making molé (I don't do it from scratch) involves emptying a glass of store-bought molé into a pot with the requisite amount of water and stirring under heat until all the lumps are gone. And beef tongue in a crock pot, that's kind of an all-day thing.

Molé is a Mexican rue, a kind of gravy that has in its ingredients bitter chocolate and ground ancho, among other things. I used it for my stock, along with a little juice that came from the beef tongue.

Peas and carrots came from the frozen food section of El Bodegòn, a really decent Mexican grocery in West Palm Beach.

Hey! If you can sell me lengua, I'll buy your peas and carrots. That's how it works.

Besides, the Michelob Amber Bock was on special.

Coupling the crêpe with a salty, spicy chorizo - hmm?

I am crêpeing chorizo this morning! Okay, bathroom humor aside. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can't turn crêpe into a verb.

I got off on the wrong foot this morning. I went ahead and started a pot of borracho beans for later in the week, then I started gathering ingredients for breakfast. Once the beans started boiling, I had this "arrgh!' moment.

The beans smell so good! It's messing with my olfactory sense. I'm going to be cooking breakfast and I have these beans interfering with my enjoyment of the breakfast cooking.

Moving on, here's the opening statement on breakfast. This is one of those interactive breakfast entrées where I will have to give you options. People who know my eating habits know I'm kind of daring with food and  this is one of those situations where your palate may disagree with mine.

This is a variation of the French crêpe, coupled with a Mexican chorizo. Think of it as a variation of pigs-in-a-blanket. The problem here is that culturally we associate the crêpe with a sweet cream or honey. The chorizo is salty and spicy. 

Pigs-in-a-blanket is topped with butter and maple syrup. So there's these preconceptions we have to deal with, and a necessary shift in expectations.

This is the chorizo I'm trying today:

Los Cerritos Chorizo. Who makes this? I don't know!

I doubt it's available in Texas, but I've tried it before and it's a very traditional Mexican chorizo that is marketed to the Mexican communities in Florida. Los Cerritos Chorizo comes from Riviera Beach, Fla.

It has no website that I can find, so I can't provide a link. The labeling suggests it is only distributed through Riviera Beach, but actually an import from somewhere in Mexico.

Now let's talk about my crêpe. This is a hybrid between a pancake - I'm not a fan of the conventional pancake - and the crêpe. If you look at the pancake recipe on a box of baking flour, the ratio of ingredients is usually something like 1 cup flour to a half cup milk and 1 egg.

That's too much flour! I have always opted for a higher concentration of egg and milk. I end up with a higher protein, fluffier cake. Since I just cook for myself, I use 1/3 to 1/2 cup flour, depending on how hungry I feel. Going strictly by ratios, this is the rule: flour and milk are added at a 1:1 ratio, and you quadruple the egg content.

So my mixing bowl has a 1/2-cup flour with a 1/2-cup milk and two eggs. When you pour this on a buttered hot skillet, it runs watery, more like a crêpe than a pancake, but not quite as thin as a true crêpe.

Crêpe cooking left, chorizo cooking right

Here's what's on the stove. Crêpe is cooking on the left skillet and a link of chorizo on the right. The batter is in the bowl and there's a bottle of Brer Rabbit Molasses Blackstrap. Pay no attention to the borracho beans in the pot!

Keep that chorizo on a low heat! With all you have going on (and I'm making coffee on the side), it's very easy to burn it. Once you have three crêpes, you've got about all you can fold into one plate. Dribble the chorizo sparingly - sparingly! - into a crêpe and wrap. Repeat three times. You end up with something that looks like enchiladas.

Fluffy, weird looking enchiladas. Dribble blackstrap molasses on your chorizo-crêpe wraps. Yes, this is where everybody starts going whaaa?!

I'm going to assume no one has ever tried blackstrap. You may think it's sweet. Blackstrap is not sweet. It's a sugar cane-based product, but it has a slightly bitter taste. It may be used as an ingredient in cooking vegetables; in fact, my bottle has a recipe for butter beans.

It might be more accurate to think of blackstrap as a sauce, like something you would put on ham. The reason I'm doing this is the chorizo is spicy and salty and I have a problem with putting a sweet syrup or honey topping on a crêpe that has a spicy, salty chorizo filling, even if there is very little chorizo used (one link was enough to sparingly sprinkle chorizo into three crêpes.

But blackstrap is something of an acquired taste, so I'm not holding you to it. You might want to top this with a sweet cream or a sour cream, or just some melted Velveeta.

A Spanish lesson. Whenever you go to a Spanish-speaking restaurant and the waitress or waiter brings your food, they say (or they are supposed to say) "Buen provecho."

This means, "Enjoy your meal."

Buen provecho!

Chorizo in crêpe wrap with blackstrap topping

Making a plantain compromise

Look at this dish. Nice presentation? I was a fine arts student for awhile, thank you for noticing.

All beef smoked sausage with plantain on rice

 It looks good, but how does it taste? Well, turns out it's missing an ingredient. The dash of Cholula Hot Sauce comes later.

Plantains are ubiquitous in Florida. They compete very well with the potato here. The plantain pile in the grocery is serious - serious as in there's a potential for an avalanche.

It is an option to the potato in fast food franchises, at Cuban and Jamaican cafes. We have plantains in Texas, too, but they don't go over quite so big along the San Antonio River.

I like plantains, but you have to be careful about choosing when to cook them. If they're still kind of green, it tastes like a potato with a hint of banana, and that's great if that's what you want. I like to let them go yellow and bring out more of their sweetness. Trouble is, that sweetness can overpower the rest of the plate.

So, keeping that in mind, I started with a leftover pot of white rice and broccoli. Nothing complicated there, I just boiled rice with chopped broccoli and a dash of salt.

I took out one link of Kiolbassa all Beef Smoked Sausage, sliced it into quarter-shaped sections. I took half of a plantain and sliced it the same way. A little butter on the skillet and it's time to grill the plantain next to the sausage, keeping my heat low. I wanted to make sure the plantain cooked through without scorching the sections.

I heated the rice and broccoli in the microwave and spread it on a plate. Artfully laid out the plantain and sausage in a circular pattern. I then cut a small block of Mexican cotija cheese and crumbled it all over the plate.

The saltiness of the dish is in the sausage and cotija cheese. The plantain fills out the palate, so you have strong flavors in competition. But do they blend together well?

I proceeded to sit down and try it out. It was ok, but ...

That sweetness of the plantain, it kind of takes over. So I got the Cholula, spinkled it all over and tried the dish again. That hit the spot. Imagine a spicy sweet sauce in a Chinese entree. This has a similar effect.

The hot sauce on sweet plantain helps blend it into the rest of the meal.

Kiolbassa chorizo: more Tex than Mex

The Kiolbassa website had this picture of a chorizo and cheese dip along with the recipe. Not the first impression I have when I think of a Mexican chorizo, but that seems to be their point. They're leaning toward the Tex in Tex-Mex with this product.

When I think of an authentic Mexican chorizo, I think of something that squeezes easily out of its link casing because it's so greasy. When you put it on the skillet, you get a substantial pool of red-brown grease that makes me think, "This is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to actually consuming motor oil."

And there is noticeable reduction in the meaty portion. As Mexican chorizo cooks, the chorizo shrinks and goes to a darker brown. By the way, don't keep chorizo on the heat too long, it doesn't take much to burn it.

The first time I tried Kiolbassa chorizo was when Arthur sent me a care package. My first thought was, "Kiolbassa makes chorizo?!" Well, I've always known them for their Polish style sausages.

I did what I always do with a chorizo link. I snipped one end and started to squeeze it out of the casing. That wasn't working too well for me and that was my first clue this isn't grandma's chorizo.

There is less fat content in Kiolbassa chorizo. It's not lean, but definitely less fat. So the meat sticks to the casing. I ended up having to slice the link length-wise with a knife and carefully peeling and scraping the contents out.

Once I cooked and tasted the chorizo, I noticed it wasn't as heavy on the spices. Most chorizos really lay on the paprika and other seasonings. This one was more subtle, which I think can be a good thing because if the spices aren't overwhelming and you want to experiment, it's easier to add ingredients without getting into a battle royal when it comes to overcoming the paprika.

My first meal preparation with Kiolbassa chorizo was more traditional. (I'm really not into cheese dip anything). I greased the skillet with butter. You don't need the butter for the chorizo, you need it for the other things you add. And in this case, I grilled chopped onion and stirred in two eggs.

Huevos con chorizo (eggs with sausage), is an old Mexican favorite for tacos. It's considered a breakfast taco, but I'll eat those things anytime.

The white corn tortillas get grilled separately. I put a little butter on a comal (a small skillet) and heat several on each side until they have a few brown freckles. Anyone who thinks you just put corn tortillas in a microwave is asking for trouble. Do it my way; soft tacos are the preferred Mexican food wrap, but there's soft and then there's the Brand X paper towel soft that falls apart and you end like Mr. Bill at the table getting sabotaged by Sluggo: "Oh nooooo!"

Once the chorizo, egg and onion get mixed together and cooked (I recommend eggs go in last and are cooked just long enough to turn egg whites white), you can add fresh chopped tomatoes. Maybe even some fresh avocado; it doesn't have to be guacamole.

One thing I love about chorizo is it's usually spicy enough that I never add salt. One less thing to think about.

I ended up with great tacos, with a chorizo that was subtle but tasty. A rule of thumb with Mexican chorizo is a little gives a lot of flavor, so your ratio of chorizo to eggs and other fixings tends to be modest. Also, you don't get all the grease out of regular chorizo.

Once it's in the taco, the grease drips, maybe even pours out, when you handle it. If you're not careful, it can easily run down your wrist and stain your sleeve!

You avoid all that with Kiolbassa chorizo. Maybe they should call it the no-drip chorizo?

For you Floridians, there's hope! I'm told Kiolbassa chorizo is available in Walmart Supercenters in Florida. That would make it Kiolbassa's first entry into the Sunshine State. I haven't been in a Walmart Supercenter here, yet. I'm curious to see who its neighbors are in the meat section.

Kiolbassa Chorizo and onion grilling on the skillet 

 Chorizo and egg with grilled onion and fresh chopped tomato on the plate, white corn tortillas on the side.

No sausage in Florida!

I recently moved to Florida from Texas and realized I could not get any of the sausages or chorizos that had been a part of my diet for a half century.

The Texas brand sausages that I had depended on were missing from the south Florida supermarkets. This had an unexpectedly profound effect on me. I had taken for granted that I would find sausage in Florida. Doesn't everyone eat sausage?

There was no Kiolbasa brand, (made in my adopted hometown of San Antonio). There were no Opa's Smoked Meats, a respected sausage line from New Braunfels, Texas.
Elgin, Texas, the home of Southside Market and Meyer's brand sausages, had not made it to Florida.
Chorizo San Manuel, the pride of Edinburg, Texas, was another no-show.
I didn't expect to find lesser known Texas brands such as Aurelia's Chorizo from Boerne, but I did expect to find something! And if there were no Texas sausages, surely there was some comparable duplicate made in Florida.

There was not. And the lack of variety at most neighborhood Publix or Winn Dixie supermarkets left me with one terrifying thought, "No, this can't be happening!"

So I got on the Internet and started researching. I came to learn that there were very few sausage makers in Florida. There is a company in Miami that has a Website that sucks. It is called the Dutch Packing Co. and their product is Garcia Brand sausages. I'm assuming by it's name that it is marketed to Hispanics, which tells me something about who Floridian entrepreneurs think eat sausage.

I said the Website sucks and I mean it. Their "About Us" section is still under construction.
Compare the link to Garcia Brand to San Antonio's Kiolbasa and you'll see the difference in sophistication.
Obviously, Kiolbasa wants to sell sausage a lot harder than Garcia.
In fact, go to any of the Websites for Texas sausage I mention and you'll see they are much more savvy at online sales than Garcia.

I was raised in South Texas and if you are from Florida and you do not know South Texas, this is what you need to know. South Texas was developed by pioneers from mainland Europe. The family histories of South Texas go back to Spain and Germany, and also to Poland and the Czech and Slovak peoples.
Anglos may have possessed a disproportionate share of the land and its wealth, but as a cultural force they were never much of an influence.

So German and Polish style sausages, and chorizo (the Spanish-Mexican versions of sausage) were then and continue to this day to be common and popular meats.

Distressed over my predicament, I began complaining to family and friends back home. The few selections in Florida were predominantly national brands from Wisconsin and New York. These were sausages to which my reaction had always been to turn my nose up.

Some of these national brands are really little more than repackaged hot dogs. They are bigger than a hot dog, but they have cereal ingredients and seasonings that leave you with that same baloney taste you get in a hot dog.
Folks who haven't tried Texas sausage obviously wouldn't know what they're missing. But I knew.

They are thicker. The links are shorter and therefore more practical to consume. The beef and pork content is more substantial in a Texas sausage. You can get mesquite smoked sausage in Texas. Try finding mesquite smoked anything in Florida; anything smoked is described as hickory or that infuriatingly nebulous "hardwood smoked" stuff.

What the hell does that even mean? And why would you admit it, actually print it on the packaging? You might as well say you are selling mystery meat!
Texas sausage makers offer sausages with such pleasingly compatible ingredients as cheddar cheese bits or jalapeno bits.
Texas sausage makers compete with each other for a sausage loving market that has a discriminating taste. They don't try to push glorified hot dogs on the public. They know better.

One of the people I complained to was Arthur Cavazos, an old acquaintance from my days as a business reporter at the San Antonio newspaper. Cavazos is in public relations and one of his accounts was Kiolbasa.
He graciously told me he would come to my rescue and send a care package.
The package arrived just before I was about to spend a week-long holiday in San Antonio, so I stuffed it in the freezer, grateful for the goods and looking forward to that valued stash upon my return.

I mentioned to Cavazos that I might start up a blog on sausage. Somebody needs to educate these Floridians on proper sausage cuisine!
And that's where this is heading.
In the weeks to come, I will be consuming and reviewing sausages. And not just Texas sausages. I will look at what is available in Florida, and I will search out sausages from other parts of this broad nation.
So, if you're a sausage lover, drop in once in awhile.
And if you have a favorite sausage, drop me a comment so I can check it out.