This is the story of how I wound up with my pasta last night, which was rather good.
A month ago I went to the local library to get a cookbook, The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy. She told me to buy lard. So I went and bought lard (I got ripped off too. I paid $5 and the other store 3 blocks away had it for $3).
Then I had too much lard, so when pork shoulders went on sale I thought I could make sausage and incorporate the lard. I don’t know if that’s how sausage is actually made, but I read a different cookbook about sausage once that said anything qualifies: meatloaf is sausage. A hamburger is a sausage. So no one can yell at me. I froze my sausage when I was done.
A local vegetable store had fennel bulbs for $1 and I had never seen such a good price so I bought one. Then I hid it in the refrigerator and forgot because I rarely own fennel.
Later in the week I remembered it and my sausage and thought it would be a good basis for pasta. I bought some nice lacinato kale to add bitterness against the fatty spicy sweetness of the other stuff. And I turned that into pasta.
But I still forgot the fennel! So the next day I cooked the fennel down and then blended it with some cottage cheese and reheated the pasta with that. And it was delicious. And nobody will ever know because when am I ever going to have this same turn of events?
But next time I’m going to cook the sausage with dandelion to really amp up the bitterness.
