Linguisa...

Leave it to Word not to know the word “linguisa”.

Today, I thought I’d write about a recent and awfully long overdue discovery: Linguisa. (There are many ways to spell it, and Word doesn’t recognize any of them.) If you know me, you know I love to cook (and eat), which is why I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never cooked with linguisa before.

Oh, I’ve heard about it. Back in high school, Sean Roberson used to talk about how his parents would cook with it. They weren’t rich or anything but my family was so poor we never went in for… you know… good food. I don’t think we ever saw pork, for that matter.

If you haven’t heard of linguisa before, WiseGeek refers to it this way: “The primary ingredient of linguiça is pork butt, which is cutinto rough pieces and mixed with spices. Pork butt tends to be lean, resultingin a leaner sausage with a more meaty flavor. Common spices in linguiça includeoregano, paprika, garlic, pepper, cumin, and sometimes cinnamon.”

That sounds pretty damned good!

I’m sure I’ve had linguisa at a restaurant but this weekend I decided to give cooking with it a try. How did that happen? Well, Costco had a display of scallops and linguisa and I thought about an amazing jambalaya I could put together… until I saw that the scallops were around $25. So, I stuck with the linguisa.

There’s not much else to say. I put together a rather rustic pasta sauce: tomatoes, linguisa, olives, mushrooms, oregano, garlic, wine, chicken stock, crushed red peppers, and maybe a couple of other things. I let that simmer and reduce and work its magic for a couple of hours and I was done. I decided to serve it over linguini so I’d have a nice, fat pasta to hold all the greasy, lovely goodness.

And it was good.

It was damned good.

I’ll tell you right now. I’m never going back to ground beef. Screw that! I am linguisa’s bitch from now on! (Not to mention now that we have mad cow in the states, I think I’ll stay away from ground beef…)

That is all. Go buy some linguisa and make yourselves some goodness.