I had made this a couple times in the past but it had been a while. Of course, she had done all the heavy lifting. All I had to do was follow these instructions:
…which I did.
Yes…that is a Baxter, one of Maine’s finest adult beverages.
It was pretty easy to grill this all up, but it took a while. The three steps took up a total of 40 minutes. But there was a tremendous side benefit associated with this dinner. For nearly an hour my backyard and by extension probably the entire culdesac…smelled like the State Fair. I remember when I was a kid, going to the State Fair was a big deal. This was back when it was over on Laburnam Avenue. We would walk through the big field that had been transformed into a parking lot towards the ticket booths off in the distance. The closer we got, the more smells there were, the aroma of the barnyard, of farm animals. Then the sweet whiff of cotton candy. But as soon as we were admitted onto the premises we would be bombarded with the powerful force field of Polish sausage, fried onions and green peppers. For a ten year old boy, this was an exotic aroma. We were a meat and potatoes family, not a lot of foolishness at the dinner table. But this…this smell… was the smell of the other, something European, something from far away. It made me think that the State Fair was somehow an international extravaganza, even though there was nothing in the entire world more uniquely American than the State Fair of Virginia. But I didn’t know any better. To this day I remember the first time my parents allowed me to actually buy a Polish Sausage to eat. They had warned me that I wouldn’t like it, that it was too spicy for me, that I would take one bite then be pestering them for a hamburger five minutes later. Lies…all lies. When I took the first bite of that gigantic, greasy feast of flavors that was three sizes too large for my mouth the first thought that went through my mind was…I wonder what else my parents have been lying to me about!!”
Thus began a life long love of sausage. Links, patties, pork, spicy, mild, Polish, German, Italian, brats, it matters not. If there was a Pakistani sausage I would probably love it too. To this day whenever I go to a restaurant for the first time and am confused by the menu, I simply look for the word “sausage’ in the entree description and go with that, a strategy that has seldom failed me.
So, to all of my neighbors who may have been wondering where that heavenly smell was coming from at 6:30 last night? You’re welcome!
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