more food prep

I don't think this can wait another week: I'd bought some fresh Italian parsley and some basil. They need to be used before going bad. I made pesto tonight, and I finally cooked up a lump of salsiccia (Italian for "sausage," but in this case, a particular type of sausage; see more here) that had been sitting in my freezer for months, then in my fridge for days. The taste of the sausage, when I pan-fried it, was a mix of familiar and enchantingly unfamiliar. The standard fennel-seed taste was there, as with many Italian sausages, but there was something else, too, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I used the adjective bewitching in describing the salsiccia by text to my buddy Mike (who'd had a very restful weekend, thanks).

This the is exact picture you see on Coupang when you order this particular sausage (no casing, as Mike noted):

See the Roman letters saying "Salsiccia Meat"?

It cooked up the way you expect sausage to cook up in the frying pan, but, Jesus—the taste! I can't get over how this thing hit me from several angles at once. What could it be? If that label has an ingredients list in Korean, I'll look more closely at it and see what I can discover.

UPDATE: I see ingredients and country-of-origin listings. I do kind of wonder—this being a sausage made right here in Hanam City, the town next to Seoul that sits just to the east and that I always mention when I do certain walks—whether the sausage, and therefore the taste I'm tasting, is authentically Italian or Koreanized. No matter: I like it.

Here's the pan-fried sausage:

I'd bought basil, pine nuts, Parmigiano reggiano and Grana Padano (a muted, sedate hard cheese the same consistency as Parmigiano... arguably boring, but it grows on you and isn't bad in pesto), so I blitzed everything together to make a pesto:

Pesto's dirty secret: it's almost perfectly keto.

It's trendy, these days, to be a pesto purist and use a mortar and pestle, since that's where the word pesto comes from. The result looks rougher and more rustic than what you get with a food processor (which I use) or a blender, arguably less saucy and more, well, natural. I've never tried the mortar-and-pestle technique before, but I'll have to do so.

I still need to make Alfredo sauce for this Meisterwerk, but there's no pressure. Tuesday is a fasting-and-walking day, and since I've decided to cancel this year's long walk, I'm under no pressure, now, to start walking every single day. Which is why I spent Monday night (and, technically, part of Tuesday morning) cooking. What's one more sauce?

Expect pics of the Alfredo sauce later, as well as pics on Wednesday of the final product, which ought to look a lot like this from seven years back, but with pesto infused through the Alfredo sauce. I'll try to do a better job with presentation, and I hope I integrate the pesto and Alfredo sauce well enough to end up with something photogenic (the photo at the link is damn ugly, but the end product tasted amazing, with perfect texture!). Parsley will be sprinkled on top. For my boss and teammate, I will try to make real gnocchi so they don't have to suffer through my ersatz, almond-flour concoction.

And I'll definitely order this sausage again. For keto pizza.