Iris and I are big fans of breakfast sausage. Some of the commercial brands aren’t so bad. I’ve been eating Brown and Serve since I was a kid. It’s not exactly good, but it tastes the same as it always has, even though you don’t have to brown it anymore (it’s microwaveable). Sometimes we buy spicy links from the farmers market, and it’s always quite tasty.

Last week, though, I made my own breakfast sausage. It was totally simple. Naturally, I used a recipe from Charcuterie. I ground a couple pounds of pork shoulder with sage, ginger, garlic, salt, and pepper. I’m still way too lazy to make links, so I cooked some patties right away and formed the rest into a log and put it in the freezer. It stays just barely sliceable, so now I can have great homemade breakfast sausage patties anytime–just slice off a few and fry them up in a skillet over medium-high. Takes about five minutes.

Next time I’ll throw in some crushed red pepper flakes. Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about making your own sausage–and I know you have–this is a great place to start. You could make chicken or turkey sausage just as easily–and the commercial turkey and chicken breakfast sausages are pretty terrible, so the gap between homemade and store-bought is going to be even bigger. If you don’t have a meat grinder, you can use the food processor, or just buy some good ground meat (or ask your supermarket butcher to grind it for you).

I wonder what I’ll come up with to complicate things in the kitchen next. I wonder if we could grow potatoes on our balcony. When it collapses, we can run downstairs and give the neighbors free potatoes.

I try to shy away from the “having a kid restores your own childlike sense of wonder” theme, because it’s true but dangerously boring.

But the other night I was planning to run down to Pagliacci for some slices, and Laurie said, “You know, we could have a pizza delivered.” Iris requested lots of olives on her pizza. She was impressed when, half an hour later, a woman showed up at the door with a pizza with lots of olives. The other half was the Brooklyn Bridge, which features pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onion, green peppers, and olives.

Iris weighs about one-sixth as much as I do, but she routinely eats half as much pizza or more.

Last night someone called from Pagliacci to check whether the pizza was delivered hot and otherwise to our liking. I should have put Iris on the phone.

I’m currently reading Eat This Book, about the world of competitive eating. The amount of food some people can put away in a competition is absolutely staggering. The gap between an average eater like me and a top competitive eater is much larger than most other individual sports I can think of. Like, I’d be terrible at the long jump, but there’s no way the world’s greatest long jumper could jump ten times as far as me. But the world’s greatest eater, Japan’s Takeru Kobayashi, routinely eats fifty hot dogs. Maybe I could eat five hot dogs if you offered me a large cash prize. There’s apparently no trick to it any more than there’s a trick to long-jumping: it’s a combination of genes, technique, and practice. (Kobayashi, incidentally, is a skinny guy, not a sumo wrestler.)

Today I could have used a little of the Kobayashi spirit, because I went on a taco crawl. A taco crawl is where a group of friends caravans around a neighborhood, hitting all the taquerias and sampling a taco or two at each one. Today’s crawl focused on White Center and Burien.

I made it to three taquerias before throwing in the towel. Admittedly, I had a hard time sticking to one taco per stand, as some of the more disciplined members of the crawl were doing. (Nobody seemed to be disciplined enough to order the same taco at each stand, though.)

When I say “taqueria,” I’m actually talking about taco trucks–two out of the three places I went to were trucks. I can’t explain why, but I’d be hard-pressed to name anything I consider cooler than a taco truck. To me, anything cooked in a truck tastes better. One of the truck, Taqueria El Rincón, added a bonus: you get to sit and eat in the truck, which is outfitted with stools and a counter on each side. That was my favorite stop of the day, partly because I got to eat in the truck and partly because I had a mulita.

I had little success tracking down the origin of the mulita, by which I mean I didn’t learn much in ten minutes on Google and Wikipedia. (I even checked Spanish Wikipedia, so you know I’m serious.) Two of the taco crawlers were friends from San Francisco, and they complained that they never see mulitas there. They seem to show up mostly in Seattle, LA, and Hawaii.

A mulita is the sort of thing you’d invent on the late-night shift at Taco Bell if Taco Bell had really great ingredients. Like a taco, it beings with two corn tortillas and your choice of meat. Unlike a taco, the meat is sandwiched between the tortillas, along with avocado (sometimes guacamole), cheese, cilantro, onions, and salsa. The mulita is then crisped on both sides on the griddle.

Of course, this will run you more than the regular taco. The going rate for mulitas in Seattle is $2.

The University Farmers Market opens tomorrow morning, and our own market, on Broadway, will be back a week from Sunday. Better yet, the University market is switching to year-round operation. Admittedly this means a lot of mussels and kale in the winter, but I like mussels and kale. Iris likes to get a blueberry strudel.

My friend Kenji is from southern California, and the first time he went to a Seattle farmers market in the spring, he said, “Wow, that was a lot of greens.” It would be cool to do a time-lapse photo of a market stand over the course of the season, and watch the colors explode and then fizzle out.

Here are some things I have threatened to make with market produce this season:

* lobster and corn chowder (Iris is extremely excited about this)
* corn chowder with fresh shelling beans
* sour cherry fool
* apple pie with cheddar crust
* just plain old corn chowder
* sausages with plums

You’re also invited to hold me to my pledge to buy more meat at the farmers market and less at the supermarket.

Speaking of chowder, I made chicken chowder last week. Chicken chowder doesn’t sound too inspiring, does it? Not to me, either, but per Jasper I started with a good organic chicken, made a strong chicken broth, then shredded the meat by hand and added it back in at the end along with the cream and a shake of cayenne. It was delicious.

The chicken was Smart Chicken brand. I recommend the product, but their website makes me want to hurl:

> MBA Poultry is the creation of Mark Haskins, our Founder, President and CEO. He named our company after his three children: Mark Jr., Bridget, and Amber. Smart Chicken® was named when Mark realized that if you have an MBA, you are likely to be smarter than most. Therefore, he named our chicken MBA Brand Smart Chicken®. Our MBA is a degree in family, which tells you how we like to treat our associates who care for our products.

I have a degree in snuggles and kittens!

According to the Seattle Times, Mexican president Vicente Fox will be visiting Seattle later this month. He’s expected to fly in on May 24th and leave the next day.

It’s not that I don’t follow politics, but my first thought upon hearing this was, “I wonder if they would give me fifteen minutes to talk to him about Mexican food.” Presumably he will initially say that he couldn’t possibly choose a favorite among his nation’s many delicious regions, but when pressed, will admit to favoring the *antojitos* of his native Guanajuato.

We’d hold the interview at a taco truck, of course. I would have two al pastor and one lengua. Fox’s choice of tacos would be scrutinized for weeks by the Mexican press.

Possibly he would order a torta.