These are great, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
A few notes:
Now my favorite sausage is called Laletka (honestly, I am unsure how to spell it), it is pork and rice.
Smoked boudin is a wonderful thing, next time you get your hands on some fresh boudin.
This is a question of personal preference, and I'm not trying to start a debate, but 'sausage' for my purposes is basically scraps or "byproduct" of common meat items, ground up and mixed with spices, then stuffed into an organic casing, usually pork or beef intestine. Once you start putting rice in there, its not really sausage anymore (according to me), more like jambalaya in a tube. You can get fresh boudin practically everywhere around here, and I've had it prepared a number of different ways. I like boudin on occasion, but not all the time. Maybe a couple of times a year.
Again, this is a personal conviction. Part of it is I don't really like rice except by itself on a plate, as a side to Tex-Mex or meat and gravy. I don't like it in a burrito, or in my hot chocolate in the morning, or stuffed in a casing with meat. I understand a lot of people do, of course.
Some of the cooks I know are beginning to make their own sausage and I think that would be pretty rewarding . . . everything like that around here is already smoked.
A go-to easy dinner for us is sausage and rice, and I'll . . . cook them in a frying pan to get a little sear on them, then add a couple of tablespoons of water and cover to steam them until they're ready.
A great quick meal is to heat up Italian sausage in a pan with roasted peppers - you can pair that with eggs for breakfast, put it in a sandwich or serve it with pasta, it's great and simple and fast.
My wife is Italian. Until I started hanging around with her family, I didn't feel strongly about Italian sausage either way. Many of the Italian families who settled in this area in the first half of the last century had one or several relatives with small, mom and pop convenience stores/markets. Almost all of the Italian-American business dynasties in Beaumont (and there are several) started in some grandpa's small store. Many families had their own secret recipe for making sausage, which was (and sometimes still is) guarded zealously. Practically every little Italian market had fresh sausage for sale, their own recipe. Honestly, there aren't that many basic ingredients - pork butt, oil, salt and pepper, steak seasoning, fennel - so the variations have to mostly be in the amounts of spices used. There is also a big division over the question of whether the fennel seeds should be put in whole, or ground. It is a tedious and sometimes violent argument, so I won't get into that. My wife has a second cousin who makes the best Italian sausage I've ever had. He makes up a couple of hundred pounds once or twice a year, and calls around for preorders. We are usually good for 20 lbs. or so, depending on what we have in stock at the time. I've been after that son of a bitch for years to give me the recipe, but he won't do it. I think once you've been exposed to fresh, homemade Italian sausage, you can no longer be neutral about it. I couldn't.
One quick meal tradition we have is to peel some potatoes and boil them about 10 minutes, just long enough to soften them a little. Then slice them and put in a skillet with hot oil, salt & pepper, and sweet red or green bell pepper. Fry that until the slices are fairly crisp on both sides. Meantime, cook/steam your Italian sausage in a seperate skillet, and scramble a bunch of eggs in still another pan (for a quick meal, this makes a pretty big mess.) Once the potatoes are done, dump the scrambled eggs in with them. Mix it together and serve with the sausage. It tastes good, and is rather filling.
I also like Italian sausage sauteed in a skillet with red bell pepper and onions. Grilled, it takes on a different character. It is tatsy, but I think I prefer Italian sausage skillet-cooked, to tell the truth.
For grilling, I use Zummo's Party Time Links almost exclusively. Like someone said about another brand, they are pretty hard to fuck up. It is just a basic smoked sausage, with some heat but not so much heat that the meaty sausage flavor is obliterated. Being an afterthought is actually beneficial, I think. By the time the links hit the grill, the fire is low, and meantime I am dealing with whatever the primary object of the barbecue was, slicing ribs or brisket and getting it and whatever else we are serving ready. When I go back to check the sausage, it has been slow cooking and is swollen up and discolored, like if some guy brought in from Cleveland just smashed all your fingers with an iron bar for not paying up on time. My guess is the fat in the sausage slowly heats up, so it doesn't quite burst through the casing, and rather circulates around and cooks the meat inside. Mmmm... The sausage cooks itself.
Now I'm getting hungry.
