Life of Wry

This is not frank and beans. I don’t eat beans, so no chance I’d go there.

This was tonight’s dinner. I’ve made it a couple of times before. Both times, we gave it our highest rating, which earned this recipe a place in the big binder.

Tonight, imho, it was a meh. A good enough meh.. just didn’t live up to its stellar rating of the past. I prepared it correctly, I have no doubts about my work…it seemed like there just wasn’t critical mass. I think it’s because I’d halved the recipe.. which yielded so little “sauce.”

So..give up? It’s Italian sausage and red grapes. You saute the grapes in a bit of butter, do a red wine reduction, then add parboiled Italian sausages (I went with both turkey and pork, mild). It then goes into the oven for 20 minutes, and finally, on the stove, you do a balsamic vinegar reduction. That’s it. It gets syrupy and sweet and goes really well with the salty sausage (better, prob, if we liked hot Italian sausages). Serve with ciabatta to soak up the sauce.. but there wasn’t enough of that.

So.. dunno.

I just found an Ina Garten video where she cooks this dish with the owner of a Providence, RI restaurant, Al Forno. The owner’s been cooking this dish for 30 years, and it’s one of the most enduring on her menu. I was gratified to see that I did exactly what she did. She had no more sauce than I had. Her grapes were bigger and she used both red and green. Her presentation was better (we served from the pot): she placed the sausages around the outside of a platter, piled the grapes in the middle and then surrounded the whole dish with pieces of focaccia (instead of ciabatta). Rustic Italian.

Here’s a screen shot from the video…

I’ll do that next time.