Sausage

I have to admit, it was a little strange writing a recipe for breakfast tacos, as much as I love them, because I think of them as so free-form. In my college days in Austin, when I powered my way to class by eating a couple of these every morning, I would change up the order pretty much each time. Cheese and salsa are must-haves, but otherwise my favorite combination is potato, egg, and chorizo. But you can also add (or substitute) black beans, avocado, bacon, and the like, in whatever lineup gets you going. Leftover breakfast foods, such as hash browns, are welcome additions, too. This makes two hefty tacos: a hearty breakfast or brunch.

Turn the Sweet Potato Soup Base into a meal with spicy chorizo, hearty chickpeas, and vibrant green kale. This makes a truly beautiful bowl of soup. If you’d rather keep this soup vegetarian, try the grain-based chorizo substitute from Field Roast, one of the first meat substitutes I’ve actually liked. It’s available in natural food stores in almost every state and through www.fieldroast.com.

This focaccia is a favorite of many early Milk Bar regulars. It is the brainchild of our beloved James Mark and will go down in our history as the most delicious focaccia man has ever made.

If you really want to replicate the Chef Shack’s most popular fall dish, go organic with the eggs and milk, try to get your hands on some bacon beer brats (they use Fischer Farms), and crisp up the bread in a deep fryer. If that sounds out of reach for you, your favorite pork sausage links will do, and a griddle or frying pan should work almost as well.

Béchamel, a basic French white sauce made with butter and cream or milk, is combined with a generous amount of homemade sausage, then poured over warm, flaky biscuits. It’s as addictive as it is undeniably rich. For extra decadence, put poached eggs (see page 75) on top of the biscuits. Make the biscuits ahead of time and freeze them for up to two months. Rewarm in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Traditionally made by my stepmother, Sue, for New Year’s Day brunch, this is a wonderful make-ahead dish. It can be prepared with canned cream of mushroom soup or leftover homemade cream of mushroom soup, and you can substitute various kinds of sausage, according to your taste. Serve with Mimosas (pages 246–247) or Bloody Marys (page 245).

Chorizo sausage gives this omelet a little kick and is a nice foil to the creamy-smooth avocado. For some extra spice, serve with Pico de Gallo (page 290) and fresh corn tortillas.

An hour after leaving Dijon, I was lost. A tangle of lanes, endless vineyards, and a low mist left me confused and desperately looking for a farm at which to ask for directions. It wasn’t the most poetic of farmyards, but there was dry mud and clean straw underfoot and tight bales of hay on which were perched a hundred or more fat, round pumpkins soaking up the late-afternoon sun like a group of ladies in a Beryl Cook painting. I whistled and called without reply; not even a dog barked. As I waited, the pumpkins seemed to be watching me, growing faintly malevolent in the fading golden light. I felt like a lost child in a haunting fairy tale. Whether it was the watching fruits or the deserted farm that spooked me, I got back in the car and left as fast as I could. Thirty years on, I think of them in an altogether friendlier light, but they are still what I want at Halloween and on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I came up with this modern take on the classic sausage and mash a year or two ago in an attempt to pacify a herd of boisterous and hungry kids that descended on me one October. It worked.

At the top of the garden, past the sunny stone terrace, the little beds of vegetables and the unruly shrubs, is a thicket, less than ten feet (three meters) deep but just enough to give the whole garden an unkempt, relaxed feel. Here lie the compost bins with their lids of rotting carpet, green plastic bags of decaying leaf mold, and four small trees of damson, hazel, mirabelle, and a King James mulberry—the latter being a “guardian” tree planted in the northernmost corner to protect the garden from the north wind. In between grow drifts of snowdrops, wild garlic sent by a friend from Cornwall, and fraises de bois, with which this garden is littered, and whose flowers twinkle like tiny stars in spring. The work in this part of the garden is mostly done in winter, if only because the leaflessness of the trees makes it possible to see what you are doing. It is always dark and cold here, and damp, too. I come in from turning the compost or cutting hazel twigs with my feet like ice, my fingers numb. Invariably it’s a Saturday, when I have been early to The Ginger Pig for my sausages. I leave them to bake with parsnips and stock. A slow bowl of food, which often sits patiently until I come in, too chilled to the bone to do anything but eat.

The potato and the leek are happy bedfellows, as anyone who has eaten a good vichysoisse will know. Softer than potato and onion, more graceful than a chowder, warm potato and leek soup has a peaceful, almost soporific quality. A silky, cool-weather soup that somehow manages to taste creamy and rich with only the smallest amount of butter and no cream in it.