Freezer archeology- pandemic edition

 It seems so long ago now, but when the worldwide Covid pandemic was just beginning, supply chains shut down and panic buying set in.  Remember fruitless searches for toilet paper?  In those early days, my favorite local grocery store got cleaned out pretty quickly and remained so for months.  Paper product, dairy items, and fresh meat and poultry were scarce, if not impossible to find.  About all one could purchase in the meat category was some pre-packaged items that had been overlooked by the rampaging masses.  That's how I came to buy a package of Gaspar's Linguica, a funky odd Portuguese smoked sausage that I had never noticed before.  Surely I could use it in some recipe while awaiting the return of fresh meat.  As things developed, the Linguica went into the freezer and was forgotten.  Until this weekend, when I made a concerted effort to organize the freezer chaos.  It was then that I found the neglected sausage that had an expiration date of 2020.  But as it was vacuum packed in heavy plastic, I took my chances and used it in one of my usual dishes- red beans and rice.

As an adopted son of the south, I may risk my membership card by mentioning that most of my best recipes come from that Yankee outfit, the New York Times. For example, I struggled for years to produce an acceptable buttermilk biscuit.  The famed Southern Living Magazine was no help, nor were other local sources.  Only when I tried this recipe from the Times did I reach buttermilk nirvana.  It's been my standard ever since.  Similarly, my recipe for red beans and rice comes not from New Orleans, but from New York.  This weekend's batch turned out delicious, even with pandemic-era sausage.

Red beans and rice