This month, as I write this blog, I feel like I am back in school, burning the proverbial midnight oil, pressing hard into the night to complete the term paper (blog) before it’s due.   I did all the research early on (made the chorizo, made the recipe, made a second recipe, and then finally a third), but putting it all together in the final product was left to the last minute.   All these years, and the same old habits.

 
I made chorizo for the first time about ten years ago after a trip to Mexico to learn the finer points of traditional Mexican cooking from Diana Kennedy.  We made twol kinds in her kitchen- the well known red spiced sausage, and a green chorizo infused with lots of cilantro- something I have never seen in the States.   We had a good laugh when one of the Betsys on the the trip- the one who lived in some terrifically conservative community on the San Francisco Peninsula like Menlo Park or Woodside, not the Betsy who lived in Santa Cruz- told us about her neighbors’ reaction when she hung her chorizos out to dry from the eaves of her house after her last trip to Diana’s kitchen. I couldn’t wait to get home and irratiate my neighbors in the golf course community we lived in at the time.   As it turned out, no one noticed the five strings of sausages hanging from my patio.

The recipe for this chorizo was drier and less acidic than what we made at Diana’s-more than four times the vinegar and six times more water went into the recipe from Diana’s recipe for the Mexican type chorizo.  My guess is that,if you were to put Ruhlman’s recipe into casing and age it, you would end up with a dryer, harder sausage more like a Spanish Chorizo.  Not much research has gone into this theory, just intuition  I would be happy to have comments on this from any educated minds. This fried up much like a regular breakfast sausage, though one with wonderful spicy,  chili-peppery flavors.

I made 5 lbs of chorizon on the Saturday before Mother’s Day.  My first effort with the chorizo was breakfast on Mother/s Day morning.  A simple scramble of scallion, chorizo, and eggs, it was really meant to please us, not to provide material for the blog.  And, please us, it did, though it wasn’t very photogenic.

What I thought would be THE recipe for this blog was the Chorizo and Potato Salad with a Garlic Aioii dressing I made for our family’s Mother’s Day barbeque. However, after spending most of Mother’s Day on my feet in the kitchen making this, I decided I didn’t think it worthy of featured placement in the blog. It was good when first made, but it had no legs- by the time we ate it, it really wasn’t special.   I’m guessing it’s a good warm salad, but it was chilled by the time we ate it, and was really disappointing.

Which all make a great tortilla, topped with the leftover Garlic Aioli. 
And it’s now midnight, so I’m going to bed!