An indefinable dinner pasta with salame

Ok, first, this dish works. But I've given up naming it.

This is a pasta dish, but I never heard of Italians cooking pasta in a curry-based sauce. Well, look at the finished product and judge for yourself:

The shiny bits in the plate, that's sardine. For a beverage, I went with an ice slush margarita in a wine glass (sorry, host doesn't have margarita glasses).

So, what's going on here? Well, I bought a Daniele Foods salame, labeled 'salame with wine.' Daniele Foods is in Pascoag, R.I.

What do we always do with salame? We put it in a sandwich. And maybe I should have stuck with that, but my experimenting went well beyond ditching the slices of rye.

I opened a bag of spiral pasta and spread out enough of it in a 10-inch sauce pan to completely cover the bottom (no second layer).

I chopped up a similar amount of fresh green beans and one carrot, and put in just enough water to submerge the contents of the saucepan. Turn on the heat and bring to boil.

While we're waiting for the water to boil, I chop up about half the salame and open one can of sardines packed in tomato sauce.

Back to the saucepan, sprinkle in a lot of curry powder, enough to create a powdery ochre sheet on top of the water. Now sprinkle in basil, shake it in almost as much as you did the curry.

In a cup, add a little water, enough to dissolved two tablespoons of starch, whisk and add that to the saucepan. Sprinkle in salt to taste.

After the pasta and vegetables have boiled for 10 minutes, add the salame and sardines. You don't want them cooking more than two or three minutes, just enough to heat them and diffuse some of their flavor into your contents.

By now, most of the water should have boiled out and you have everything saturated a thin curry and basil sauce.

This serves three people. It has a mild, savory taste. There is not enough fish in the saucepan to overpower it; in fact, the fish portion was very mild tasting. This salame is a little bland, but cut into quarter chunks, you have  pieces sizable enough that you can at least appreciate the taste.

One last note, notice I never mentioned hot peppers. I usually throw in some spicy seasoning, but I wanted to try this without any to see if it worked. It did.

Buen provecho!

Turkey chorizo: is the healthiest choice tasty?

I'm not a fan of some of the things that people try to do with turkey meat, but I have to admit (and I'm paraphrasing Elle Woods here) "it is not altogether unfortunate tasting."

Andy Garcia Foods, a San Antonio chorizo factory mentioned here previously, came up with Mama Garcia's Turkey Chorizo some time ago. My first and most natural reaction to seeing it on the meat shelf was probably, "Oh, hell no."

In the interest of science, however, I picked up a tube of turkey chorizo and consumed the contents over the course of three breakfast meals.

I've given a number of very similar versions of my hueves-con-chorizo breakfast recipes to the point of ad nauseum, but, again, in the interest of science, I have to maintain some baseline, so as to compare this chorizo to other egg-and-chorizo breakfasts.

Going with the usual ingredients: two eggs, chopped onion, tomato and hot pepper.

So, other than the turkey, what's different about this chorizo?

Well, I'll tell you! First, when you squeeze it out of the casing it is thoroughly consistent in density, or more accurately the lack of density. It doesn't have clumps of meat and fat like all other chorizos. It comes out, to put it politely, like toothpaste. Other images may come to mind, but let's not dwell, let's not!

Turkey, compared to any sausage I've ever tried, is kind of bland. I suspected, therefore, that this would be bland, too. So, I did something I never ever do when I cook with chorizo and I added a little salt while it was grilling.

I also grilled the vegetables at the same time. Chorizo only needs a few minutes to cook through. I stirred occasionally and added the egg last as usual.

It turned out adding the salt was a good idea. Once the meal was on the plate, it was tasting pretty good, but just a little short on salt (to my taste, and I'm usually more conservative with salt than most).

I'm not going to do the math, but here is a link to Mama Garcia's Turkey Chorizo nutrition facts. Lower in fat, blah, blah, blah. (Not something I worry about much, although perhaps I should, but there's plenty of folks out there that do).

All in all, it's a pretty good substitute for a pork chorizo. Put it this way, compared to a Mac Dee McNugget, you'll be way ahead.

P.S. -- The side with this is a bean mix of three-quarters pinto bean boiled in a ham seasoning with chopped chipotle and one-quarter cow peas.

It is a dah-yum good bean side for this or any number of meals. I've also had it with melted cotija cheese bits and guacamole for dinner tacos.

Buen provecho!

Migas with a "dry chorizo"

Migas is one of the most traditional Tex-Mex breakfast dishes and the main three ingredients are fried or dried tortilla chips, eggs and cheese.
In fact, you don't need anything else but a little salt to call that migas (pronounced mee-gas). The typical choice of cheese is a mild cheddar.
Most restaurants, however, will add a salsa to their migas. The salsa is a blend of tomato (or tomatillo), hot pepper, and onion. Or in lieu of a salsa, the cook will throw in a chunkier blend of the same ingredients (tomato or tomatillo, hot pepper and onion).
Since this is a sausage and chorizo blog, I'm going to throw in a little chorizo, although that would ordinarily be considered a side, as in "migas con chorizo al lado" (migas with chorizo on the side), or "migas con frijoles fritos al lado." (I'll skip that last translation).
The chorizo I'm going with is labelled a "dry chorizo" and it's made by Diana Foods Inc. in Miami, which is a subsidiary of Goya. I've tried a dry chorizo before, and they are very different from Mexican chorizos, so much so that I don't consider them the same thing at all.

Using these Spanish/Cuban-style dry chorizos, you have deal with them like you would a beef jerky: tough and salty. You almost cannot dice them fine enough. Cut it into very small pieces, keeping in mind the dominant taste -- other than meaty -- is salt and paprika.

A side note here, I could not find a website for Diana Foods Inc. The Internet listings I did find referred me back to Goya Foods. This is a recurring situation I find with East Coast chorizo producers. Their websites either don't exist or they have a very modest presence on the Internet.

Food prep time! Chopping tortillas into sections, chopping chorizo, canned jalapenos and onion. (There is a second dish I make where I chop a tomato; I did one with and one without).

I would normally put a dry chorizo on the grill first. It's already cooked, but it takes a while to get the grease to run. However, since we have refrigerated tortilla bits, these corn tortillas need to fry a little.
You are not trying to make Doritos! It's common to fry them very hard, but don't. You just want harden the tortillas bits to a leathery texture.
Soon after the chips start cooking, toss to one side the chorizo.
After a couple of minutes, throw on the onion and jalapeno.
Next to last is the eggs, AND stir it all together.

Our last ingredient is cheese. I prepared two styles of migas here. One is with cotija, a Mexican white cheese and doesn't melt.

The other, and more traditional, is an American sharp cheddar cheese that does melt. Also, this dish has tomato.

Notice the proportion of dry chorizo with each compared to the other ingredients. It's a modest proportion -- 25 percent or less of the volume of ingredients before egg and cheese is added.

Any more and it's going to overpower the meal. It will be too salty, too heavy.

Migas with cotija cheese and homemade tortilla on side

Traditional migas with cheddar cheese

Traditional migas with cheddar cheese:

The tortilla chips are fried, but not crunchy! Don't overdo the grilling.

And buen provecho!