Rotini and Sausage

Another hot recipe from the kitchen of Ginger Bangs

So we’ve got a drizzly wet Sunday here in Nova Scotia. It’s not too cold, but it’s cold enough to be uncomfortable. So my plan is to put together a kind of belly-warming stick-to-your-ribs kind of meal.

So here goes.

First off, let me make one thing clear.

I am NOT any sort of kitchen goddess.

Why?

I don’t cook fancy. I don’t cook pretty.

I just cook.

Cooking is about as easy as cold beer going down on a hot summer day.

Basically there are maybe three or four different ways you can cook something. You can fry it. You can boil it. You can bake it.

No matter what sort of gourmet restaurant you step into — no matter HOW blue the plate may be and no matter what price tag is dangling off of those vittles odds are that they were fried, boiled or baked.

It just isn’t as hard as some folks like to pretend.

I started off by gathering the ingredients.

Meaning I looked around the kitchen to see what I had to work with.

I looked in the fridge. We had a leftover sausage — one of those big fat smoky sausages with chunks of cheddar thrown in to the meat so that you can tell yourself that this stuff is healthy on account of cheese is made of milk and EVERYONE knows that milk is healthy — isn’t it?

Please don’t disillusion me.

I’m just cooking here.

Nothing fancy.

I’m just building a meal.

First off, I looked through the pasta cupboard and found a box of rainbow rotini.

You know that stuff that is red and green and white? They make it with spinach powder and tomato powder added to the pasta so that you can ONCE AGAIN pretend that it’s healthy — on account of it’s got vegetables in it.

I found a half a yellow pepper and a couple of radishes and I pulled a big fat red onion out of the onion bucket. I boiled some water and threw the pasta in to boil. Then I threw a fry pan the size of Cincinnati squared onto the burner and I chopped up the onion and pepper and sausage while the fry pan got hot.

It is important to remember that some of the sausage was NOT sliced evenly — so I had that throw those uneven chunks of sausage into my mouth and chew them thoroughly. There’s nothing I love better than a mouthful of sausage.

Then I moaned a little over the taste of the sausage, like I had fallen into a waterbed full of horny football players.

Hey — a woman wants what she wants.

Then I chopped up the onion and pepper. And yes, I know I chopped the onion and pepper about a half-a-dozen paragraphs ago. What do you want — a perfectly written article?

I’m an artist, not a starship doctor!

I splashed a bit of oil into the pan. I generally prefer olive oil for the taste mostly. Some folks prefer avocado oil, because it’s got a higher flash point, meaning it’s not likely to smoke up your kitchen. Some folks use plain old vegetable oil, but that’s only if you’re particularly desparate.

I stirred the sausage chunks in next. I want that sausage to sizzle a little bit, to give the meat that gorgeous dark caramelization.

Damn. Don’t I love that word, caramelization. You just can’t say that word without feeling your mouth water.

I sliced up a clove of garlic and threw it into as well. There’s garlic in the sausage, but you can never too much garlic in a good stir-up.

Then I spilled a little more olive oil into the hot fry pan and I threw the onion and pepper and sausage into the oil. Stirred like an occasional lunatic while keeping half an eye on the pasta, making sure that it did not boil over.

Occasionally I applied my lips to a happily opened bottle of beer. There is only one thing I love wrapping my lips around more than a happily opened bottle of beer.

When the pasta was ready I dumped it into a colander and then dumped the pasta back into the pot. I tipped the nicely sautéed peppers and onions and sausage into the pasta.

For those of you who don’t know — sauté is a five dollar word for “fried” in oil or butter. In French the word sauté means “jump” or “bounce”, which is what your ingredients tend to do while you are stirring them.

Then I dumped in a package of Velveeta cooking cheese — garlic and herb flavor. I could have just as easily have added some butter and garlic powder — or shredded some cheese and added a little milk and stirred — but the Velveeta was in the fridge — which made it handy.

The whole thing took about as time and brain power as it took to write this blog entry.

Repeat after me folks — cooking isn’t hard.

It’s dead easy.

Thanks for stopping by.

Got to go now.

Hi! My name’s Ginger Bangs. I’m new here in Medium. I usually write erotic fiction, but I also the occasional poem or article on writing. Every weekend I like to throw in a recipe of some sort.

I guess I write like I cook. No rules, no real structure, I just like to tell stories, is all.

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