Palacios from Spain: OMG! This is so good.

I'm not often pleasantly surprised with sausages that I don't buy from Texas or Mexico, but I have to say this Palacios Chorizo Picante is 'oh my God' good.

I found a 7.9-ounce Palacios sausage at a Publix grocery in downtown Fort Lauderdale. I'd never seen it before and I was curious, so I tossed it in the cart and kept moving.

This is an import. It comes from La Rioja, Spain. That's a rural area to the far north that really isn't close to anything people here might have heard of except for maybe Pamplona. Yes? No?

The ingredients are about as simple as sausage ingredients get: pork, paprika, salt, garlic. It says it's all natural and has no preservatives; I guess salt as a preservative doesn't count in Spain?

Whatever. Did I mention I really liked this sausage? I mean really. This simple recipe is to perfection. Just the right amount of everything. I would totally buy this one again. It says it's "hot" but I didn't find that to be the case.

On the other hand, I paired it with a homemade guacamole that had some spicy poblano pepper as an ingredient, so that might have masked its heat. But I don't think so! Not that I'm holding that against it, obviously.

This meal! It turned out really well. I'd rank it in my Top 10 of all the meals I've blogged about to date. And it's so simple! Let's start with cooking a pot of brown rice. That will take 45 minutes to boil, so don't even bother starting the protein portion of your entree until you've had the rice cooking for about 30 minutes.

But here is what you can do in the meantime. Take a quarter section of a Florida avocado (those big light green ones), and a quarter section of an average size tomato, and about a third-cup's worth of fresh onion, a tablespoon-sized section of poblano pepper and a thin slice (less than quarter-inch thick) section of lime.

Put all this in a blender, except for the lime section; just squeeze the juice out of that into the blender. Add about four good shakes of salt, put the lid on and blend. Now put your guacamole in the fridge.

Here's the Incredible Trio: a two-inch length of Palacios sausage, one egg and two healthy looking scallions.

By the way, these proportions are a meal for one. Double the quantity if you're inviting company.

Heat a sauce pan. Put your section of sausage on a cutting board and dice it up fine (almost to pea size bits).

Now that your sauce pan is warming, pour in about a third-cup water and a slice pat of butter and then toss in the sausage and get it to diffuse its grease and reddish coloring (paprika) into the water-butter mix.

Quickly chop up the scallion. Just as the water boils, toss in the scallion and stir a bit. Do not let your fluids dry out, make sure that heat is medium.

You want just enough grease and moisture to crack in the egg, so it doesn't stick. Toss the yolk or don't, depending on your taste and health concerns. Stir until the egg is no longer watery.

I served the rice on the bottom from center to one edge, and layered the chorizo-egg-scallion over the rice.

Guacamole is on the side. I had mine with a porter beer, but I could see going with a red wine or sangria or just a fruit flavored water.

What do you think? Come on! You've gotta try it.

Buen provecho!

Fish & smoked sausage noodle soup

I can't say it enough, it doesn't take a big budget to make a big budget meal.

A can of sardines, a package of smoked sausage, some chopped onion and a packet of shrimp-flavor Ramen noodles and you're there.

Whoa! Did I say Ramen noodles? Okay, now I know (I know!) there are people out there that went through some lean times and were stuck eating Ramen noodles every day. I've heard about them. I've even heard it said some have sworn that once they started making a living wage they would never, ever, ever, ever ... EVER! eat Ramen noodles again.

Okay, so to you Ramen noodle haters -- hey, I felt that way about pizza for years -- I say to you, pick a different noodle. But my point is this is a low-budget meal.

So, calm down. Let's get started.

Open one can of sardines packed in olive oil; how painful was that to your wallet? Chop some onions, the quantity depends on whether you're cooking for one person or two, and whether either of you really likes onions, or not so much.

For the sausage, we're going to use Meyer's Elgin Smoked Sauage with Garlic. Why? Because I can, or could until I ate my supply of Meyer's. But any kielbassa style sausage with garlic will do.

Meyer's is called Meyer's Elgin because these sausage makers are from Elgin, Texas and Texans tend to identify Elgin with sausage. Their website is called 'cue-topia because they like to make cute with the word barbecue, as in the Utopia of BBQ, and not to be confused with Utopia, Texas, which is 177 miles southwest of Elgin and an entirely different story altogether.

Boil the Ramen noodles with the shrimp flavor seasoning and chopped onions. That takes, what, seven minutes? Now take your diced sausage bits (one or two links, depending on how fond you are of meat byproducts) and toss them in the soup, let that simmer for a couple of minutes to get the grease flowing.

The last item to go in is the sardines. You just want to heat the sardines, so turn the heat off and let the heat you already have simmering do all the work. This should take all of 60 seconds.

And serve!

Now don't that look great? It's righteously tasty, too.

Notice that I didn't even break up the sardine. It's about as whole as I could get it coming out of the can.

Oh, yes, and there's a salad involved. I made a big salad. It had romaine lettuce, tomato, chopped bits of dried fruit (apricot and plum), sesame seed, garlic croutons, olive oil and a twist of lime juice.

Buen provecho!

Kiolbassa expands Costco distribution

San Antonio-based sausage manufacturer Kiolbassa Provision Co. got into an additional 55 Costco stores in the upper Midwest by the end of July.

Kiolbassa previously sold its products in 17, Costco stores in Texas.

“This is three times as many Costco buildings as we are currently in, so it’s a huge opportunity for us,” said Michael Kiolbassa, president of the eponymously named company. “Our plant is capable of producing probably about 5 million pounds more than we’re producing, so there’s plenty of capacity to grow.”

The recent additions expand the company’s presence into the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky.

In May, it started distributing at 73 additional Sam’s Club stores in the upper Midwest and in the Southeast. It had been selling at 17 Sam’s stores before then.

Kiolbassa products are now available to about 1,255 stores. The company now distributes in 20 states.

Kiolbassa said the family-owned company has had an annual growth rate of about 17 percent for the past 20 years.

The company’s 25,000-square-foot Texas plant expects to produce 10.5 million pounds of sausage this year.