Shortcut: cooking with sausage meat
A sausage is pork in its most perfect form. The fatty mince is perfectly seasoned and expertly injected into a casing. For a lightning-fast meal with extra flavour, simply remove that casing again and cook the sausage meat loose.
Writing for an online platform means receiving a lot of very visible criticism. If people disagree with you, they immediately post about it on Facebook. That’s how I got angry comments on my piece about those bloody irritating green bananas at the supermarket (apparently those rock-hard green specimens are your favourite, sorry) and my fool proof method for cooking rice was called ‘a sad way in which the Dutch ruin good food.’ Salt in the rice? Ridiculous! Of course, that’s absolutely fine, I don’t lose any sleep over it, except when I recently wrote an article about how to pimp your pasta sauce in no time at all.
Sausage meat? How dare you?
In that article, I suggest adding ready-made sausage meat to your ready-made pasta sauce. One reader absolutely did not agree. That I dared to add sausage meat to pasta sauce and then call it pimping—the audacity! But huh? Wouldn’t this reader know that Italians have been doing nothing else for years? And not just any Italians: Giorgio Locatelli, the now-deceased Antonio Carluccio, they all add sausage meat to pasta.
And why not? A good sausage is nothing more than minced pork, pepper, salt and often some other herbs. Take it out of its casing, and you have the ultimate flavour bomb to add to your dish. You don’t need to season it anymore; the butcher has already done that for you. So, chuck it into that pasta sauce. For example, into this Sardinian pasta by Carluccio, which also contains dried porcini mushrooms (yet another flavour bomb).
Pizza
Another favourite? Homemade pizza with sausage meat: the salty meat becomes crisp at high temperature, making it the ideal pizza topping. Or turn it into a quick hamburger, an over-the-top lasagne or small sausage rolls for your next party. For all I care, fry it and mix it through your salad. As long as you don’t consider yourself too good for this ‘ready-made’ product, because then you’re denying yourself far too many delicious things.
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