Month: October 2023

Sage apple sausage

Sage apple sausage

You can make your own breakfast sausage in just a few minutes and get just the flavor you want. In our version, we leave out the common onion, garlic and hot peppers, which are great in dinner sausages but overpower eggs or pancakes. Instead we add a bit of apple to the sausage, which adds moistness and an interesting accompanying flavor.

 We mix the spaced together in a mortar and pestle that we liberated from our chem lab decades ago, but you can easily buy them online. Lacking one, you can chop the spices together with a knife on a cutting board, or use a blender.

  • 1 Tb dried sage
  • 1 Tb dried thyme
  • 1 tsp fennel seed
  • 1 tsp brown sugar
  • 1 ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
  • 1 lb ground pork
  • 1 tart apple, peeled and cored
  1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a mortar and crush them with the pestle, until the spice blend is uniform.
  2. Using your hands and/or a wooden spoon mix the spices into the ground pork in a medium bowl.
  3. Mince the apple pieces by hand or using a food processor and mix the apple into the pork mixture. You may not need all of it.
  1. Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop out the amount of meat for each sausage.
  2. Cook the sausages on a 375˚ F griddle for 4 minutes per side. Press them down so they are flat. You might want to set a timer to keep from over cooking them and drying them out. The sausages are done when the internal temperature is around 145˚  F.
  3. Keep the sausages warm while you prepare the pancakes or eggs to go with them.

This doesn’t take much longer than cooking frozen sausages, and the flavor is really terrific!  Form all the remaining sausages into patties and freeze them in layers, separated by wax paper in a plastic freezer container.  Makes about 1 dozen  good-sized sausages.

Spaghetti alla Nerano

Spaghetti alla Nerano

Nerano is a charming Italian fishing village south of Naples on the tip of the Sorrento peninsula, just across from Capri. It is here the Spaghetti alla Nerano was  invented in the 1950s. Stanley Tucci introduced flocks of American fans to this classic dish in the first episode of his “Searching for Italy” series, And recently the New Yorker published a definitive recipe for this fabulous dish. We tried it a couple of times and have some suggestions to make it work a little better.

While the ingredients are just spaghetti, zucchini, cheese and maybe a pat of butter, there are some details in the recipe that make it work so well. First of all, the zucchini slices are deep fried, not pan fried, and you want them to get quite brown, nearly burnt to develop the flavor in an otherwise pretty tasteless vegetable.

Confronted with the need to thinly slice three or four zucchini, we resorted to our Cuisinart food processor, using the 2mm slicing disk.

Probably the most important thing about this dish is assembling while everything is still hot, so the cheese will melt. In professional kitchens. Two people assemble this dish. We’ll tell you how we did it with only two hands below.

The basic ingredients are:

  • 3 medium zucchini
  • 8 oz spaghetti
  • Deep frying oil: sunflower or canola
  • 2-4 oz grated cheese (Parmegiano Reggiano or Provolone del Monaco or Caciovavallo)
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 bunch basil leaves, cut up
  • Pat of butter
  1. Grate the cheese in a food processor, and remove to a bowl
  2. Slice the zucchini into thin, uniform slices. We used a 2mm slicing disk.
  3. Deep fry the zucchini slices, until quite brown. For 3 zucchini, we divided them into 4 batches for frying.
  4. Put the zucchini on paper towel on a plate to let them drain.
  1. Bring a couple of quarts of salted water to a boil and add the spaghetti all at once, stirring with a pasta fork to make sure it submerges.
  2. Heat the zucchini and garlic in a skillet.
  3. If your spaghetti requires, say, 4 minutes to cook, scoop out a cup of pasta water around the 2 minute mark.
  4. Put about 10% of the zucchini in the bottom of a medium bowl, stir in a handful cheese and add hot water to help melt the cheese into a creamy sauce.
  1. As soon as spaghetti is about done, lift a little out of the boiling water and mix it into the bowl. Do not drain the spaghetti: it will cool too quickly, just lift it right out of the hot water.
  2. Then in several layers, add zucchini, hot spaghetti and cheese and stir, adding more hot pasta water when you need it. The zucchini and cheese tend to clump together, so this layered mixing helps distribute it throughout the pasta. You may not need all the spaghetti. But when you have mixed all the zucchini and cheese with some of the spaghetti, stop and arrange the mixture on a serving plate.
  3. Top with a pat of butter and the basil leaves and serve right away.

You can serve this as a main dish or as a side dish. Here we illustrate a side dish serving with a few meatballs to make the meal.  You will be amazed at how good this simple meal can be!