Pasta, Peas and Passover

Wine: Chateau Maris 2003 Minervois Syrah from Silver Lake Wine

We started with the Radicchio Salad from the Zuni Café Cookbook. When we lived in San Francisco this was our favorite restaurant. (Think chicken for two, French Fries, Cesar Salad, Martinis). In the book, Judy Rodger’s states this salad is there second best seller. We have never seen it on the menu! However it is great! It is always fun to have a salad without lettuce and this one is a winner!
It is made from Radicchio, Anchovy Dressing, croutons and chopped egg. The radicchio was young in the market and small, but was excellent.

I have been volunteering at KCRW Radio Station working on Friday’s on To The Point, a great current events program. Last Friday as I walked out they had some give away recipes from another KCRW program, Good Food. I grabbed one of the collections of the Top 10 Recipes of 2005, and brought it home. One of them caught Cathy’s eye and we decided to make it. It was Mint Postcards with Spicy Lamb Sausage and Minted Pea Puree Pasta made with Merguez sausage. It is a signature dish of Mario Batali’s

So on to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market to buy fresh young peas. We bought a huge bag of them on Sunday, and Monday I got to spend the an hour listening to KCRW’s To The Point, while shelling and shelling and shelling peas.

The question for us was where do you buy Merguez sausage. We started calling around to no avail. I decided to Google for it, and found Jeff's Gourmet Glatt Kosher Sausage Factory & Deli Meats. We were out to have dinner at Lucques on Sunday Night (like we do every Sunday night) and we decided to stop at Jeff’s first purchase the sausage and head on to Lucques. I expected Jeff’s to be a Kosher Market. I was wrong! In the middle of a very Jewish area of Los Angeles, Jeff’s is a sandwich shop with their own made Sausage, Pastrami, great smells of French Fries etc. I never knew it was there. They had two types of Merguez a pre-cooked Moroccan and a raw Tunisian. Of course we bought both so that we could have a Merquez sausage-off. The Tunisian was spicier. We declared the sausage-off a draw and used both. The Pea Puree was a very smooth and flavorful. For the assembly of the dish, pasta mixed with homemade tomato sauce and both sausages, topped with a large dollop of pea puree and then pecorino cheese. This is a spicy pasta. I think we will make it again, but with a different sausage. Turns out Jeff’s is closing for 2 weeks due to Passover holiday. I never thought about it before, but I guess a Glatt Kosher sandwich shop is out of water during Passover, if they can’t serve bread. It would be hard to eat a sausage sandwich on Matzo. However, in 2 weeks, when they are open and I am returning from KCRW on Friday, I am going to stop and have a sausage sandwich and fries from lunch! Chris at the Cheese Store of Silver Lake sold us some new pasta, Tagliatelle by St. Cerdito. It was very good, and packaged as one of the biggest packages of pasta I have ever seen!