italian sausage week

the kind of italian sausage we buy usually comes in a pack of 5. i only needed 2 sausages for my sausage fennel risotto so i had 3 left to come up with dinners for this week. tuesday night we made a plain old spaghetti with ground sausage and that left me with one sausage. normally on wednesday's we have small group in which we leave directly from work to go to and end up coming home, starving, around 8:30. the typical dinner on these nights is a frozen, thin crust pepperoni freschetta pizza that we add whatever vegetable(s) we have in the fridge to. on this night we were short on veggies and we had that one sausage left over. my inspiration came from my first fly fishing trip back in 2006 in which my best friend, brian erickson, unbeknownst to me competed with me for when ordering lunch our first day in aspen. see there were 5 of us fishing and we had been eating whatever we caught mixed with the bare essentials for wilderness camping. we found ourselves in a city for lunch one day and decided to order some pizzas. not thinking this was going to be a competitive endeavor, i went for a pepperoni, mushroom, and fresh tomato pizza. brian, who had been in the mode for impressing and "educating" ordered a sausage pizza with red onions and pepperoncini's. apparently the rule was 3 toppings. needless to say, his pizza won over the rest of the crew by about 1 million fold! so, back to our post-small group dinner, i had the makings for a repeat! we had just gotten over a visit from marcela's college friends, mike and katie smith, who reside in seattle, and had samples the freschetta brick oven, 5-cheese pizza as katie is a vegeterian. it was surprisingly tasty despite the lack of meat. marcela and i decided that base pizza was good and we wanted to try it again with our own ingredients. marcela's not a fan of pepperoncini's or onions so i decided to go half and half with our pizza. uncooked sausage is really tough to cut in discs so i par grilled the italian sausage before cutting it. top chef is one of our favorite shows and a recent episode featured a tomato provencal. i have no idea what that is, but one of the criticisms was that the chef didn't pan fry the tomato. i've noticed from making home pizza's before that if you just put freshly cut tomato's on a pizza, they add too much moisture and the cheese doesn't fully melt and "brown". so, i cut the tomato's into 1/4" slices and pan friend them in a tiny, tiny amount of olive oil so i didn't end up with standing oil. i took these pan fried tomato's and spread them across the pizza. then, i put two sausage discs on each tomato before putting thinly cut red onions and pepperoncini's onto my half of the pizza. i can't quite describe in words how good my half (or her half for that matter) was, but let's just say the thin crust pepperoni pizza might take some time before purchasing again!

sausage and fennel risotto

here's the grocery list, ie ingredients, for the sausage and fennel risotto. you make it just like any other risotto so i'll spare you the directions...just trying to post more things on this blog!

prep

i think i'm going to start using this blog as my own personal blog...but if you noticed, i said "i think"...

this morning marcela had to go in to work early (as opposed to staying late yesterday, which i totally agree with her on) to finish up a project and get it plotted before 9:30. i was not in the mood to prep our lunches last night as i ended up making a sausage fennel risotto for dinner last night (after getting the week's groceries) and was too tired. so, i actually spent some time "cooking" this morning! we switch up our lunches quite often, but one of our favorites to eat are chicken wraps. i had set out 3 breasts to thaw overnight and so i fired up the grill at 7:15! let me tell you, it was hard to not start playing the k-state fight song and crack open a keystone light! the last time i can remember grilling anything this early in the morning, i was in manhattan surrounded by my buddies getting ready to watch jonathan beasley and the wildcats get ready for a football game. anyway, chicken wraps are fairly easy to prep for as we usually just add lettuce and tomato's to the grilled chicken, but i still thought it was fun to be cooking in the morning. it also made me reminisce about working at goldfork and having to get all sorts of things prepped for the days service. i definitely love doing architecture, but i think i could have handled working at a restaurant. i wouldn't have even minded just being a sous chef or a line cook. the kitchen is a great place to be.