My Dinner; Let Me Tell You It

Yesterday was kinda hectic; Sundays are my day with the kids as Annika racks up several yoga classes. I woke up without goals, but the Spring air filled my lungs and suddenly I wanted to be cleaning and organizing. That’s a bit like shoveling snow in a blizzard with my kids around. And eventually, as I attempting to sort, stack and chuck my way through the chaos, there was the question of dinner. There again I didn’t have a plan, but Annika mentioned that there was lamb sausage in the freezer and I could put together something around that.

Read on for my rare display of culinary genius!

The lamb sausage came from our part of the monthly share from a local meat CSA. And I was casting around for inspiration. I love sausage, onion and peppers together, so that was a start. Annika’s got this “three things” rule about dinners–they’ve got to have a protein, a green, and a grain. Okay, so sausage and peppers got us most of the way there, but I still needed the grain. And lo! A pound of whole wheat fettucine was trying to hide itself under some bulgur wheat in our grain store, but it did not evade my clutches for long.

The divine inspiration came to me moments later. I was poking around the Food Network website for an idea, and I was thinking about my recent doctor’s visit. Apparently, my “good” cholesterol is a little low, and Annika told me that more olive oil could solve the problem. Ding! Aglio e Olio.

Emeril’s version kicks the classic recipe up a notch by adding a decent quantity of red pepper flakes to the simple mixture of oil and minced garlic. I could eat gallons of the stuff over pasta, and thick strands of fettucine hold a lot of sauce. The accidental brilliance came along when I topped the pasta with a stir fry of onions, green and red peppers, and that lamb sausage.

Now, my childhood allergies rocked my senses of smell and taste like a hurricane. Subtlety of palette is lost on me like Renoir on a caveman, so when I put something together that isn’t awful, I consider it a win. Well, on this occasion, the kids liked it. Annika liked it. I personally could have had a third bowl, but I stopped at two. I figure this is rare enough that it is time to write it up

So, for the record:

Emeril’s Aglio e Olio recipe (linked above) over 1 lb. whole wheat fettucine. Use about 1.5 tbsp of kosher salt in the boiling water; enough so that you can just taste some saltiness in the pasta.

For the stir fry, cut up 3 or 4 onions and get them going in a pan with a little olive oil; they need the longest to cook. Then cut up two red pepper and two green ones, or do what I did and just pull a bag of frozen, pre-cut peppers out of your freezer. Add these in with the onions after five minutes of onion “alone time”. After these got going, I cut up the lamb sausage into little bits and got it started in a separate pan. After they were browned, I threw them and their juices in with the stir fry. After a couple more minutes, dump the stir fry into a colander that won’t melt(!).

I served the pasta and stir fry separately because I dodn’t know how the kids would do with the spicy fettucine. Turns out that the sweetness of the veggies offsets the spiciness of the pasta and the result is even better.

Let me know if you get a chance to try this out. Hope you like it!