Off Like a Prom Dress

I am happy to inform you that we here at BTiGB are off on a marvelous sunny summer adventure in far-off lands and will be reporting the delicious things we will eat there, to be blogged either while we're traveling (depending on the vicissitudes of internet connections and electrical sockets) or when we return following Independence Day. Stay cool, and eat a delicious burger for me, would you? Where I'm headed I doubt delicious burgers are a common phenomenon.

The Hasty Girl's Dinner While Packing for Exotic Foreign Travel

• 1 garlic & sage chicken sausage from the Meat Guy at the Greenpoint Greenmarket
  
• half an onion, sliced lengthwise into half-rings
  
• whole-wheat hot dog roll
  
• olive oil
  
• last of the mixed-greens spring salad of arugula, frisée, red-leaf, etc.
  
• relish, grainy Dijon mustard made with red wine, ketchup

1. The hasty girl throws the big black cast iron skillet on the heat, medium high, and lets it get angry dark and seething.

2. The hasty girl interrupts her sorting through her skirts to slice the sausage lengthwise, opening it like a book. A very narrow book, made of meat.

3. Olive oil finds itself drizzled carelessly in the pan, despite all cookery warnings that olive oil does not belong in a very hot pan. Sure enough, it threatens to smoke, but before it gets a chance, in goes the onion with a stir; in goes the sausage, flat side down.

4. Hastily, she washes her hands, cutting board, knife. The room fills with the sizzling odors of garlic, sage, onion, olive oil. The chicken juices sizzle recklessly against the iron. She turns the sausage over. She checks the medicine cabinet for anything that might be of use on the other side of the planet.

5. A few stirs later, she realizes the sausage, while browned in a lovely way, is not cooked all the way through. She pours in some beer, just a quarter of an inch, to encourage a bit of hot braising to solidify that sausage. Then she wonders what happened to that white undershirt she'd just bought.

6. When the beer is burned off and the onions are thoroughly browned and dried out some so they're not as mushy as they were a second ago, she pushes the sausage and onions to one side and lays the hot dog bun open flat in the pan, to toast. She pours the rest of the beer into a glass, to be fancy.

7. Bun on plate. Sausage open in bun. Onions, relish in sausage split. Mustard and a touch of ketchup over all. Lettuce on top. Many napkins required.

8. Fortified, she considers, with all the gravity required of the question, shoes.


All the best,
BTiBG