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!