Polish sausage and chocolate milk

I went to the Hannam Market on Friday and bought myself a pack of sixteen Polish sausages by Gwaltney. When I boiled my first three sausages and slapped them into the hot dog buns with gobs of mustard, relish, and Vietnamese red pepper paste (instead of ketchup-- try it), I wasn't all that impressed. Tasted like a standard hot dog.

Today, however, I boiled another set of three... and guess what.

It's all about the time, baby.

If you boil those suckers long enough (i.e., over ten minutes), you get franks that are not only exploding out of their skins, but almost twice as thick as they were before. Made all the difference in the world.

While I'm on the subject of little things that make a big difference, I'll tell you about another discovery I made.

I occasionally buy Korean powdered chocolate from the local grocery. It comes in a tin can painted Hershey's brown. In fact, the logo for it ("Won Foods") brings Hershey's to mind, font and all. The chocolate itself is crap-- nothing special. It's weak cocoa powder inelegantly mixed in with large-granule sugar. Plop a couple spoons of the stuff into a cup of milk, stir it with your spoon, and it barely mixes. You end up with sugar on the bottom of your cup, a weak tint of chocolate in the milk, and an unpleasant head of unmixed choco-froth sitting atop the whole mess.

But about a month ago, I decided to try an experiment. I poured milk halfway into my tall drinking glass, then glopped in the Won Foods chocolate. I grabbed my wire whisk, stuck it in the drinking glass, and whisked away by flattening my hands and rubbing them in opposite directions, causing the whisk to whip madly back and forth between my palms. After thirty seconds, I topped the glass off with more milk and gave the whole thing another quick stir.

The results were nothing short of amazing. While I still ended up with some sugar at the bottom of my glass, the chocolate milk I drank was recognizably chocolate milk. Incredible. And the foam at the top was of a wholly different consistency and flavor. Veddy nice, veddy nice.

Some of you ladies might be thinking naughty thoughts because of all this talk of "sausage" and "buns" and "milk" and "head" and "between my palms." I assure you, I mean nothing by it. Only your dirty minds would draw such connections.


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