My Favorites

Few people has sent me a questions asking what is my favorite food to cook. Oh my, that's like asking for my favorite book - or a mother who is their favorite child, I imagine.
I can't pick just one dish, but I can tell you my absolutely favorite cuisine is Italian.
And I love mustard, in all forms and tastes it is just delicious. I love to taste it in different flavors and have bought some local variants of mustard to take home with me while traveling.
And I love sausages! Bratwurst, cabanossi, chorizo, salami, chipolata, kielbasa... never tasted one I haven't liked. I sometimes joke that I went for the culinary technology degree, because while I was in Pastry school, I saw them making sausages, and wanted to learn how to do it myself. But while sausage making, Charcuterie, was one of my favorite classes in culinary school, it certainly wasn't the reason I went there.

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So to tie all  these favorites together, I made one of my favorite meals today.
I bought some high quality, raw Italian sausages from the market, called Siciliana Picante. They were made with pork, with addition of rosemary, chili peppers, and Parmesan cheese. I like them because of the high meat content of the sausages, 88%.
I started with basic marinara tomato sauce.
Now since the sausage is raw, I wanted to cook it in liquid first for a couple of minutes, before frying it. My choice of liquid was beer, but you can do it as well in just water. Just make sure you don't puncture the skin of the sausages.
And while the pasta cooked, I fried the sausages in a pan, shredded some Parmesan cheese, cut some chiffonade of basil (stack,roll slice)
and made a green salad with some bell peppers and French Dijon mustard salad dressing.

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Simple basic tastes, just few components, matching together in harmony -- that's what cooking is all about for me.

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