Using balsamic vinegar in a spaghetti and sausage entree

I'm moving. And I'm trying not to go to the grocery store. Emptying out the cupboards and the refrigerator, so I won't have so much to carry.

The spaghetti box is emptying out to, but I've got enough for a meal. The trouble is, I'm out of everything tomato. No fresh or canned tomatoes. No tomato pasta sauce in a jar. In fact, nothing obvious of any kind. I'm even out of onions. Time to improvise!

I do have fresh garlic, chop two cloves. There's a section of dried guajillo chili left, snip it into tiny squares. I have an unopened packet of Orale! azafran (a Mexican brand saffron). Sprinkle in about a tablespoon worth of azafran.

While the spaghetti boils, I heat up a saucepan and pour virgin olive oil across the bottom. Then I put in my garlic, guajillo and azafran into the hot oil. Stir a little, then get a bottle of balsamic vinegar and give it two hard shakes; don't use too much or the vinegar taste will overpower everything.

Pour in about a two-inch link of Pollok's sausage (really, any Polish sausage; Oh, I forgot to mention it's been sliced and diced to tiny bits first). Now stir, stir, stir, stir!

Burn off that balsamic vinegar, get it penetrating all of your ingredients. Stir, stir!

Take you saucepan off the heat as soon as the edges of the sausage get dark. And take the spaghetti off the heat as soon as it's al dente. Don't cook it until its all soft and fat!

Are we good? Everything's off the heat? Now, drain the spaghetti and toss it into the saucepan. Put the saucepan back on the heat and stir until everything is mixed uniformly.

This dish works as is. By that I mean you can eat it like this and it tastes pretty good (unless you had a heavy hand with that balsamic vinegar bottle! Yes, I've done that, too. Yuk.)

But you can also add a little something dairy, if you don't mind the extra calories.

Try one dollop of sour cream. Stir it in after it's on your plate. Then sprinkle all over with Parmesan cheese.

It looks like this, if you get your eyeball down in your plate.

The guajillo gives it just a little spice, but it's by no means too hot. And you add sour cream, you'll hardly notice the spicy, anyway.

My dish came out a little more oily than I expected, but I only used enough spaghetti for one modest-sized entree and I'm used to making enough for three meals.

At any rate, it's good!

Buen provecho!

Pollok's: some salty "Polski kielbasa"

Maybe I picked one out of an off-day batch. It's a small sausage shop in Falls City, Texas, but the Pollok's kielbasa I've been cooking with this week is the saltiest kielbasa I've ever had.

A suggest: easier on the salt. I know you've got to have it, but this one was a little over the top. Having said that, look, I run into this with chorizos often. Mexican/Spanish-style sausages are so strong that I always use them sparingly as an entree ingredient.

Pollok's sausage -- from Falls City

Trouble is, I normally have a meaty size portion of sausage, a link of at least four inches (or two links, if I'm really hungry).

This meal is a fairly standard version of huevos rancheros (Mexican-style ranch egg breakfast).

Chop fresh onion, tomato and canned jalapenos and leave them in a bowl.

Chop potato to your size preference for hash browns. I don't put mine through a grader, but you could. 

Getting to the fires, start by frying potato on the grill, then lay out your sausage links. Once the potato is near to cooked and your sausage is greasing out and blistering, crack two eggs and cook them eggs over easy.

Get some tortillas warming. It won't be long now.

As soon as the eggs are turned, throw the onion, tomato and jalapeno down on whatever space you've got left on that grill. (I hope you heated the tortillas someplace else, or that likely won't be any space left).

We should have turned the potatoes over a few times by now and they're ready to pass to a plate.

Next off -- same orders as when you put them down -- is the sausage.

Slide the eggs over easy off about a minute after you turned them over, or they'll get too hard.

 And this is what we end up with, a hearty breakfast:

If I had it to do over, I'd have served myself less sausage. Aside from this being a little on the heavy side, I was surprised at how salty the sausage came across.

Pollok's Sausage Plant and Deli is less than an hour's drive south of San Antonio. Their brand of kielbasa is sold in San Antonio groceries, but it's one of the less common brands.

Marcian and Mary Pollok came to Texas in 1854, six years after the U.S.-Mexican War. They came from upper Silesia with about another 100 families.

The family recipe went commercial when their son, Alex Pollok, started offering Pollok's sausage in his butcher shop in the 1920s.

It's passed on through the generations ever since and today the family-run business produces 15,000 pounds a week. It's sold from the Hill Country to the Coastal Bend, and the business employs 18 people.

V & V Sausage -- Flatonia's own

V&V Sausage, yet another well established Texas sausage, comes from  Flatonia, a little town off of Interstate 10 about half-way between Houston and San Antonio.

The company started in 1955 with Edward and  Alphonse Vinklarek out of the kitchen on a farm near Cistern, Texas. The next year, they rented a general store and post office, converting it into a processing shop.

V&V Sausage modernized and expanded in the early 1970s. Today, V&V Sausage is found in groceries and BBQ restaurants all over Texas.

I picked a jalapeno smoked sausage. It's a little spicy, but it's not the jalapeno you notice. The family recipe goes strong on the black pepper.

I'm trying out three meals here. One is a dinner and two are breakfast dishes.

Let's start with dinner. The vegetable is simple. Open a can of beans. Hey, does always have to be time-consuming?

Your choice: ranch pintos, Van Camp's Pork & Beans. Personally, I went with Bush's Baked Beans Country Style.

For a starch, we're making corn pancakes. Half-cup cornmeal, one egg and a quarter cup milk with a half teaspoon of baking soda and a dash of vegetable oil will grill up enough cakes for two.

Heat up as much sausage as you want on the grill and you're good to go. Easy enough?

Baked beans are kind of sweet, of course. I can see opting for a ranch-style cooked pinto bean if you don't want all that sugar.

This first breakfast is not sweet. It's spicy and hearty and simple. Just one vegetable: grilled onion.

I grill onion in equal proportion to the sausage, 'cuz I want plenty of it. Heat the diced sausage and onion together. Neither needs a lot of time on the heat. Add the egg after the grease is flowing and the onion gets tender, but don't let the onion burn.

Stir it all up and put it on the plate!

While you're cooking the main entree, see that sharp cheddar?  We're heating corn tortillas on a separate heat source. Melt cheese on the second heated tortilla, the lay the first tortilla over it.

Your quesadilla (a grilled cheese flat bread) is your side.

Put it all together.

And this is what your plate should look like.

Uhm: see below, then continue scrolling.

This second breakfast is sweet, because that's how sweet potato rolls.

Dice sweet potato small, like hashbrowns. Grill it first, it'll take a few minutes to cook. 

Add our spicy V&V Sausage, then add the egg.

I had mine with tortillas (of course) and hot sauce. You may want to pass and eat it as is or with a slice of toast.

Buen provecho!