Hey everyone!

Welcome back!

Speaking of “welcome back” I’ve just returned from my 2 day jaunt to San Diego County and all I can say is THAT was not relaxing.

It was really strange doing so-called “normal” things when every-fucking-thing is fucked out there.

OF COURSE it was awesome seeing my youngest daughter and youngest granddaughter. The beach was great (holy mother of god the visuals were mind boggling) and I got to hang out with our own Low Commander for a good part of a day.

Hey Balls, you’ll be happy to know that we watched a recording of an AFL game, featuring Geelong destroying St. Kilda.

As two of the folks who also knew our dear departed tWBS extremely well, you can rest assured that Low Commander and I raised a toast in his honor.

Miss you buddy.

While this may sound fun and relaxing just know that my goddamn nerves were fucking frazzled the entire time I was there.

Aren’t you seriously supposed to be wearing a fucking mask at this point?

Because a lot of these motherfuckers did not.

But my granddaughter was SOOOOO happy and excited to see me that it made tears well up in these rheumy old eyes and I would walk through Hell to see that expression again. And any time I can hang out with Low Commander I will happily do that as well.

The good news is that once I got home I finally did fully relax so basically the trip actually worked for stress reduction in the end.

Easiest drive I’ve ever made to San Diego County too.

Alright, so let’s get to today’s menu already!

Today’s inspiration was a damn simple one:

I had a ton of basil and parsley in the old herb garden and it was high time I used some.

With that much herbage the idea was pretty goddamn easy.

I made pesto.

You long time readers know that we’ve done pesto before, a couple of times actually.

The first linked recipe with the gnocchi is very similar to the sauce we will make today.

Penne with pesto and Italian sausage!

For the pesto:

2 cups – packed – basil  and parsley leaves

1/4 cup of raw pine nuts

1/3 cup of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Romano would work too

3 cloves of fresh garlic rough chopped

2/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon of salt

some grinds of black pepper.

Gather your herbage together and give it a good rinse. Actually I ended up soaking mine in cold water. They’ve been out on the balcony for awhile and I wanted to kill off any wildlife that may be inadvertently interloping.

While the herbs are soaking we can address the raw pine nuts.

Place the pine nuts in a small pan and over medium/high heat give ’em a good toasting for a few minutes.

Stir around or you can just toss them around using the pan handle. Like so.

First thing we’re going to do is add the rinsed and dried off herbs along with the toasted pine nuts and give them a few pulses in the food processor. Use a spatula and scrape down the sides of the food processor bowl.

Next step is to add in the cheese and the garlic.

Give this another few quick pulses to combine.

Now for the fun shit.

Place the, what the fuck do you call that thing? The slow drizzle insert? That plastic fucking tube that goes into the feed tube on the processor. Yeah, that. Put it in the feed tube then turn the processor on its lowest setting and start to slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Might take a minute or two.

When the oil has been successfully added you should have something like this.

Scrape out all of the goodness and season with salt and some grinds of black pepper.

There you go. Slap some plastic wrap on this fucker until ready to serve. It will safely store in the refrigerator for several days.

For the basil cream element:

1 cup of heavy cream

Pesto that we made before

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1 tablespoon of butter

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/4 teaspoon NUTMEG!

Black pepper to taste.

Combine all ingredients into a pot and simmer over a medium-low heat. This won’t take very long to cook and you can easily do it in the time it takes to cook your pasta. Bring to a simmer.

Since we’ve snuck that “sausage” word into the title of today’s post, guess we better discuss our sausage.

Get some.

That’s about half a pound of sweet Italian sausage. This is the same sausage that was leftover from our Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza post from last week.

Get yer sausage into a skillet and give it a good browning. I seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper. This time we will indeed brown this shit thoroughly.

Know what? You could even (gulp) DRAIN THE GREASE if you saw fit!

I’ll let you guess if I drained the excess grease off or not. The answer probably wouldn’t be much of a fucking surprise to you regular readers.

For final assembly add the browned sausage to the pesto cream sauce and cook until hot and bubbly.

Now all you gotta do is serve this over some cooked pasta. I went with penne today.

Yes. It was store bought.

As penance for being a lazy shit and using store bought pasta, I taught myself a goddamn lesson!

And made yet another loaf of french bread from scratch!

One. More. Time!

French Bread

(copied and pasted from a previous effort)

Yes, we’ve done this before but to save you having to search for it:

3 to 3 1/4 cups of flour

1 package of instant yeast

1 cup of warm water at a temperature of 110-115 degrees. This is important dammit.

2 tablespoons of sugar

2 tablespoons of canola oil

1 1/2 teaspoons of salt

some cornmeal

1 egg white

1 teaspoon of cold water

Add the yeast to the working bowl of your mixer then add in the water. Let bloom for a couple of minutes. Now add in the oil, salt, sugar and the first 2 cups of flour. Put your paddle attachment on the mixer and give it a spin.

You know the goddamn drill. Hook attachment, 10 minute timer, walk the fuck away. Remember?

Now the oiled bowl, cover with a clean towel, let rise until doubled in size, punch down, rise again shit.

Shape and do the final rise.

Score the bread and add the egg wash.

Into a 375 degree oven for 25 minutes.

Ready for the reveal?

Goddamn!

What’s cool is I made this loaf on Sunday – as always – and took the leftover bread down to San Diego County with me so youngest right and littlest right could try it out.

So THAT was cool.

Anyway. Back to the finished meal.

If you’re not making the bread this could absolutely be a week night dinner. Pretty simple to prepare, well I guess you do need a shit load of basil and/or parsely but the sauce is easy as hell and can be assembled in minutes.

It’s even OK to use store bought pasta for this.

How did we do?

Hell yes I used some of the leftover parsley as a garnish.

Let’s get a closer look at that bread again.

My mind keeps fucking with me whenever I make garlic toast out of freshly made bread. It even feels a bit like heresy.

Ain’t you supposed to use day old bread to make toast? Isn’t that the exact fucking reason you’re making goddamn toast in the first fucking place? Cuz the bread is old?

I don’t give a single motherfuck because this is the best garlic toast you will ever have.

Have you ever had garlic toast that was fresh from the oven and tasted like homemade bread? That had a delicate crispness to it?

Hell no! Nobody does that!

I’m trying to start a fucking trend over here!

Oh yeah, the penne with pesto and sausage.

Know what that sauce basically is?

Fucking sausage gravy.

Yep.

It’s the most herbacious sausage gravy you’ll ever eat but it’s still goddamn sausage gravy.

It’s fucking awesome! Shit, I should have made biscuits to serve this over.

It worked fucking famously with the penne and was even better the next day. Rich and savory and so much herbal goodness.

Y’all gonna love this shit.

This entire fucking year, man!

Be well and be good to each other.

Stay safe and keep doing the right thing. We’re over 5 months in people.

Stay strong.

See you next week.

PEACE and UNITY!