10.28.2006

More fun with meat!

It is a lovely Saturday afternoon where I am equally jazzed about the perfect heating system in the apartment (10ft. radiators on either side of the 18ft. windows, as well as radiators almost everywhere else you can think of, including directly below the towel bar in the bathroom, AND heating elements under the floors), Richard Swift's double album "The Novelist" and "Walking Without Effort," and my serendipitous lunch/dinner.

After wandering around town on my bike, really enjoying the late autumn feel of things (the bitter smell of fallen leaves, cold wind, and the anticipation of wearing tights and gloves and big coats), I went to Dirk (pronounced dairck) and bought the ingredients for the quintessential autumn meal: sauerkraut, sausage and brussel sprouts. The sauerkraut and sprouts were no problem to find, but the sausage posed a problem. When one is dealing with tube meats, it is difficult to decide what to buy under the best of circumstances, but when the meats contained within those tubes is labeled in a language that bares no resemblance to Hillshire Farms, it becomes nothing but blind guesswork. Apparently I learned nothing from my unfortunate sausage experience in Spain, where I thought I was buying a salami-type thing to go with the (e)cheese, olives, and bread we were having for a snack, but instead bought raw sausage. (LeeAnne nicely reminded me that only buying sausage found outside the refrigerated meat case might prevent this from happening again.) Instead of remembering that advice, I went ahead and bought something in a tube that I thought resembled American-style-German sausage. Actually, that is a lie. I saw some sausage that looked EXACTLY like the sausage I remember. It was in the "wurst" section of the supermarket and would have been just the same as anything available at Fred Meyer. Did I put down the three links I had bought in the meat section? No. I did not.

Long story short...I cut it up (it was indeed raw and also very soft) and put it in the pan, where it promptly turned brown. It wasn't until I started singing, "Have it your way," that I realized I had bought ground beef and not sausage at all. So instead of throwing in the sauerkraut, I threw in some canned mushrooms, tomato sauce, zucchini and potato slices. It is delicious, and now I can look forward to my German dinner later in the week, especially since I now know that not all tube meats are created equal.

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