Italian Entree

SPICY ITALIAN SAUSAGE

INGREDIENTS

1 medium white onion
2 large garlic cloves
6 mild Italian sausages
water enough to mostly cover sausages
1 cup olive oil
1½ tablespoons oregano
6 slices sourdough bread

Serves 6.

PREPARATION

It really is a good idea to thoroughly defrost the sausages. If not, you will have a tough time judging when they are cooked through. Frozen sausages cook quickly on the outside while still remaining cold, if not frozen, on the inside. You’ll either burn the outside before the inside is done or spend a lot of time at a low-to-medium temperature to cook it evenly. (And what if your guests are ravenous vampires? You don’t want to keep them waiting.)

Be sure to jab each sausage with a fork before cooking. Hot grease builds up inside the sausage if it doesn’t have an escape route. Jabbing a cooked sausage with a fork can result in a jet of hot grease heading toward you. Owie!

Mince onion and garlic cloves. Put sausages in a saucepan. Pour water on them until they are nearly covered. Pour in olive oil. Add garlic, minced onion, and oregano. Bring water to a boil. Reduce heat to a warm and simmer for 30 minutes.

Toast the sourdough bread while the sausages simmer. Sourdough bread goes great with Italian sausage. Put the sausage in the bread. Serve it like you would a hot dog. Spoon some of the olive oil/water mix along with some of the onion and garlic. Let the oil seep into the bread. Add a little of the liquid at a time to the toasted bread so that it doesn’t soak all the way through.

Wouldn’t buying spicy Italian sausage be easier than this? Yes, of course it would, but good cooks will want to have their blend of spices accenting the sausage rather than someone else’s. Also, pre-spiced sausages can never taste better than those with fresh onion marinated in olive oil.

TIDBITS

1) Sausages and legislation are the two things you should never see being made, only the final product. The Swedes like to mix in potatoes with meat to make their sausages. The Swedish word for sausage is korv.

2) I’ve never seen a sausage explode, but I’d bet it would be spectacular, if not dangerous. A frozen sausage makes a better hand-to-hand weapon than a defrosted one.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.