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Who Doesn’t Love a Good Sausage Fest?
Big or small … I love them all
Here in bayou country, they make sausages out of everything — alligator, crawfish, shrimp, duck, pork, chicken— and add anything you can imagine — cheese, apples and pineapples, hot or sweet peppers, pickled onions, roasted yams, wild rice, and other stuff I don’t even recognize.
It’s a city girl’s dream come true. And hardly anything goes better with sausage than fresh collard greens.
Cooking collards never fails to remind me of my late mother, and how much she hated the rinsing and the picking to get them clean for holiday suppers. “Maybe I could put them in the washing machine,” she once wondered aloud to nine-year-old me.
“That’s a great idea, Mama!” I was a gifted child — everybody said so. (I have no idea how much she had to pay the plumber the next day, but I do remember it took hours to clear the drain.)
For me, though, the prep work in the kitchen is rhythmic and soothing, and gives me the chance to play with the ingredients. Like last week — I pulled off the road in the middle of God-Knows-Where, Louisiana when I saw a dozen signs for a fresh truck market. And by truck market I mean he had the, uh, market … in his F150.
