spicy goat sausage, osso buco sauce; beet greens; potato

Almost half of this meal was composed of leftovers.

I was already eager to try the goat sausage I had recently picked up at our local farmer/purveyor’s stall in the Greenmarket, and then I remembered that just inside the refrigerator I already had a sauce that would probably be perfect for the kind of richness they seemed to promise. Last night I confirmed it.

The beet greens, also a leftover, were a last-minute addition, and their sweetness was the perfect foil for the meat and the meat-derived sauce.

The boiled potatoes of course were a natural.

  • four spicy goat sausage links from Consider Bardwell Farm, pan-grilled then arranged on top of a rich sauce that remained from an osso buco entrée we enjoyed last week
  • some beet greens, also leftovers from a previous meal, heated and drizzled with a little olive oil
  • new potatoes from Norwich Meadows Farm, boiled in salted water, drained, dried in the pan, halved, rolled in butter, seasoned with sea salt and freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, tossed with chopped lovage from Keith’s Farm and chopped parsley from Norwich Meadows Farm

There was a dessert, and, only by coincidence, that meant there was more goat.

This may have been the first time I had ever prepared gooseberry anything, having always been afraid of their notorious tartness. I had bought them a week ago, and they look and taste the same as they did then, on the eve of the Fourth of July. That seems to say something about their sturdiness, and I already knew how wonderful they taste. I washed ‘ended’ the berries with a sharp kitchen shears, and boiled them with an amount of sugar less than I thought they were going to need, but which turned out to be perfect.

Last week I had in fact purchased 3 different kinds of berries.

  • about a quarter of a pint of gooseberries from Wilklow Orchards, gently heated in a small high-sided pan with a few drops of fresh water and a few tablespoons of turbinado sugar until the berries had softened and the sugar dissolved into their juices, spooned over scoops (one for each serving) of Lā Loos ‘Vanilla Snowflake’ goat milk ice cream from Whole Foods Market that had themselves been centered on the top of 2 slices a delicious ‘cream cheese pound cake’ from Wilklow Orchards, the farm which had also been the source of the berries

I have more sauce, and still more gooseberries, so we’ll have another meal or two in the near feature featuring the homely ‘great American leftover’.

And I haven’t even started on the blueberries.