When a case of Diet Coke exploded in our garage refrigerator, in a spring cleaning frenzy, I asked my husband to hose it down since it would soon be grilling season again (although for Kagee, it’s apparently all year round). During the purging of the exploded cans and a few bottles of presumably stale Coors Light -he stumbled upon a package of frozen blood sausage which was left over from our first annual sausage fest held last July.
"Should I throw this out?," he asked.
Even though it was about 9 months old old, and frozen (almost) beyond recognition, it wasn’t a rhetorical question; he knows well how upset I can become if something is inadvertently tossed. "You threw away my lucky sage?," I might say, "I was saving it for a smudging ceremony." (To him, it was dead foliage in the back of the vegetable drawer; to me it was an aborted purification ritual).
Our sausage festival was one of our more memorable parties - even more so than the "bring your own ball" tree-trimming bash or the martini "wakes" we host in celebration of Xmas and my birthday (in January - see above photo of some of the babes in black). The most notable martini party was held at the same time as a Pampered Chef demonstration. The hostess was somewhat dismayed when she realized no one was paying attention to her demonstration, but retrospectively thrilled when she realized how many sales she had made based on the number of martinis consumed. Of course a lot of the guests ended up sleeping on the floor, but I scored quite a lot of crockery for future celebrations…including a sausage casserole made with kielbasa, apples and cheddar cheese…
So to segue back to the Sausage Fest - since many of my gal pals were unattached at the time, when I extended the invite to the Sausage Festival they immediately thought I was using Freudian imagery and that I was actually inviting them to singles networking event of sorts and wanted no part of it. "I'm happy with Ben and Jerry," one said, "I don't want a sausage in my life." When I convinced them that the invite should be literally construed and that the sausage they would meet would be the likes of Jimmy Dean or Bob Evans - they flocked in droves. Kagee, who helped me formulate the concept, invited her sister-in-law with two young dogs (Monkey and Tula) to help eat the spoils of the event, as well as her dog Polly (name changed to protect the guilty) - who can stuff more into her small frame than a team of Alaskan Huskies. Kagee and I had determined some months before at a Pierogi Party (the details of which I’ll spare you) during which one of the guests was a hyperkinetic caterer, Kent, who had an "in your face" style of conversing (despite his protective girlfriend Para's "looks that would kill" to any woman who went near his rolled proscuitto appetizers - which were even worse that her usual disgruntled "I hate the world" stare) made everyone afraid to talk to him and incur her wrath (particularly since she, like most of the people there, were like Sumo Wrestlers) – we got into a rousing discussion about a safe subject - food - and collectively came to the conclusion through that every ethnic group makes some type of sausage; even our Jewish friends, who shunned pork, ate Kosher hot dogs from time to time…and the Vegans ate tofu…and so on and so on… The more we talked about it, the more types of sausage we thought of and then we realized that July was the birth month of Basha, the Kielbasa Queen – so we had no choice but to schedule in July.
Left - Basha and Slim Jim after the fateful meeting at Sausage Festival.
Everyone came to the table with something delicious (with the obvious exception of whoever brought the blood sausage, which never made it to the grill). Irina and Katrina, a/k/a The Mojito Mamas brought their own mint masher for the drinks which made them famous and got everyone smashed; Katrina also brought an abundance of chocolate covered strawberries from the infamous Carlo's (City Hall) Bakery in Hoboken; Mrs. D. made sausage and broccoli rabe; Slim Jim (who, coincidentally, has is slender and has the same name as a popular type of beef jerky treat) brought macaroni salad (I think he might have gotten the invite to the Pasta La Vista bash by mistake); Basha was crowned not only with Kielbasa, but ended up linking up with Slim Jim (probably because she brought tuna pasta salad and they sensed they could make beautiful macaroni together); Mrs. Meo - three hours late as usual - looked more like Liz Taylor than ever - and brought cupcakes. I tried to spike a melon but only once section ended up with any alchohol content whatsoever, so whoever had that chunk might still be somewhere in the garage...
All of the above being said – and despite unappetizing blood sausage frozen solid into an igloo-esque mass in the back of the garage freezer…I’m already trying to figure out the best time to hold this year’s bash and searching frantically for recipes involving weenier, bangers - and of course – seasoned tofu tubes. All recipes gratefully accepted.
