I love sausages. Not the kind variety that goes by the label Vienna sausages though. Hotdogs? The good ones, yes, but definitely not the red kind that shrivel and shrink when cooked. I love real sausages — the highly seasoned, smoky, deep-flavored ones that have been left to hang for a long time.
And I don’t just cook and eat sausages in their original form. I like to combine them with a lot of other things. And I especially like slitting the skin open, pressing the minced meat out and cooking it in lieu of plain ground meat.
Add crumbled sausage meat to rice and you have one heck of a meal. Try the sausage, onion and tarragon risotto and the cooked-in-the-microwave sausage and mushroom pilaf.
Sausages and pasta? They’re ideal partners. My favorites include the mighty meaty pasta with tomato cream sauce, the sausage and milk pasta and the spaghetti aglio e olio with sun-dried tomatoes, bacon and Hungarian sausage.
Want to see the recipes that go with all the photos in this post. Go to the sausages archive — there are currently 70 recipes listed there.