A New Year, and Italian Sausage with Lentils

Italian Sausage with Lentils

So we're well into 2015 at this point, and this post is late. I made a promise to myself to try to post at least once a week this year. I've been trying to bend time to my will and the damned stuff just keeps seeping from between my fingers. Better late than never, I guess.

I'm going to kick things off with a recipe as I've been cooking a lot lately, and I'm starting with sausage and lentils because I'm jonesing for the south of France. Someone please cast me in something that's going to give me a good excuse to go to Cannes. Mama needs a working Mediterranean vacation. 

Until then, I'm living vicariously with a bowl of comfort food that doubles as protein fitness fuel. Sausage and lentils is also a popular dish around the dawning of the new year, as lentils are said to symbolize coins (i.e., wealth). Since everyone wants a little more abundance in our lives, where better to begin that pipeline than the digestive tract? When it tastes as good as this does, you may as well bow to tradition and make some. 

No, really, just make some.

Italian Sausage with Lentils

1 1/2 cups dried French lentils
     (not to be confused with brown lentils, another beast entirely - get the French)

1 cup diced carrot

1 cup diced onion

1 clove minced garlic

2 1/2 cups diced fennel bulbs

6 Italian sausage (mild or spicy, your choice)

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup white wine (if not using wine, use 1/4 cup additional water or broth)

1/8 cup chopped fennel fronds

1/4 cup chopped parsley

olive oil

salt 

pepper

Sort through the lentils quickly (nobody likes rocks in their lentils), and give them a quick rinse under the faucet before adding them to a saucepan. Cover generously with cold water (about 5 cups should do it) and add about 1/2 tsp salt to the pan before bringing to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, partially cover the pot, and cook the lentils until they are al dente. Drain lentils and set aside.

In a large skillet or dutch oven, add your sausage links to about 1 tbsp of olive oil and brown on all sides. Remove once brown - it does not have to be cooked all the way through. Cut the sausages into coins and set aside. 

In the same pan you just used, saute your onion, carrots, chopped fennel bulbs and garlic in an additional 1 tbsp of olive oil. Add about 1/2 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of cracked black pepper, your wine to deglaze the pan, and your 1/2 cup of water. 

Add your sausage coins back into the vegetables, and turn the heat up to a gentle boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cover the pot. Once the sausage looks like it has cooked all the way through, remove the lid, add the lentils to the pan, and stir to combine. 

Allow the flavors to come together at a low simmer for 10-15 minutes. Add parsley, fennel fronds, additional salt, pepper, and olive oil (if desired) to taste, and give it another stir before serving.

DEAD SPECIAL CRABS: previews begin November 7

Post by Amy Lee Pearsall.

the mighty acorn

From Christina Katz's "The Writer's Workout." Kind of loving it.

walking the walk

Thoughts from "Meditations from the Mat" by Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison. Highly recommended.

Burning Down the House

The end of summer has always felt downright magical to me. When I was a kid, we actually had three months of summer vacation, and those days of late August bleeding into September were heavenly. The air seemed thicker, the cicadas louder, days spent in the neighbor’s pool more frequent. There was the anticipation of new teachers and classmates, shopping for clothes and school supplies, and a birthday cake right there, in the center of it all.

I've always loved to learn, though there were some subjects I was better at than others. These days, “school” is working with a financial adviser to face my bad monetary self in the mirror. It’s not been easy for me. It’s like taking economics and bookkeeping, both of which I blissfully managed to skirt during my formal education. But still – progress.

It’s also birthday time over here. Well, it will be shortly. For me, it’s not about candles (wait, that's a lie - I love candles), or even about age. It's my personal New Year’s Day, and it’s kind of sacred. This year, it feels even more so. Whatever your feelings on astrological juju, this past Monday was the new moon in Virgo: a period of reckoning and new beginnings, if you’re into that sort of thing (I’m not particularly, but if the moon can affect tides and my mood, I may as well use it to my advantage). I sussed out my top goals for the year to come, and decided how it is that I want to feel every day. (How important is that, you ask? Really damned important.)

And in keeping with the theme of new beginnings and clearing the decks, tonight marks the 90^th anniversary of the burning of Zozobra in Santa Fe. If you’re not familiar, Zozobra is a 50-or-so-foot-tall effigy of “Old Man Gloom” that gets burned to the ground. (Lest anyone think this is a rip off of Burning Man, Burning Man started in 1986, and is all sound and fury, but no soul, sort of like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome –1985, thank you very much – with all the great costumes, but sadly without Tina Turner. Sorry, Nevada; you lose.) 

I can’t be in my native high desert tonight – indeed, vacations are off the table for a while until I get these checks and balances in order – but through the glory of the Internet, I can live vicariously. SantaFe.com will be live streaming the event, and I've got some piñon and sage incense around here somewhere. Good things are coming. Out with the old.

Theater in the Now: Spotlight On...Amy Lee Pearsall

I just got all chatty on the interwebs! Check out my recent interview on theatre blog Theater in the Now. Among the topics on the table: my upcoming show KING KIRBY, which opens this Friday as part of the Comic Book Theater Festival at The Brick in Brooklyn. It's a great production; come check it out!

Up Next: KING KIRBY

In case you missed the announcement on other forms of social media, my next project will be KING KIRBY as part of the Comic Book Theater Festival at The Brick in June. I am super stoked about it:

Husband-and-wife playwrighting team Fred Van Lente (award-winning, New York Times best selling comics writer of COWBOYS & ALIENS and ACTION PHILOSOPHERS!) and Crystal Skillman (NYIT Award-winning playwright of GEEK, CUT and THE VIGIL) combine their talents with director John Hurley (ACTION PHILOSOPHERS!, LICKSPITTLES, BUTTONHOLERS, AND DAMNED PERNICIOUS GO-BETWEENS and THE VIGIL) to produce the hysterical and heartbreaking story of this titanic figure – how he poured his quintessentially Twentieth Century life into his comics, and the fateful, tragic mistake he made that led the man to obscurity while his creations became known to every person on Earth.

Rehearsals kick off later this week. In the meantime, mark your calendars and check out the Kickstarter campaign!