This is what I would have imagined being fed if as a child if I grew up in some Spanish villa. Instead I grew up in a ranch style house in suburban San Francisco eating macaroni and cheese. Not that there is anything wrong with that cheesy goodness, but chorizo sausage it is not.
When I saw this recipe in July’s issue of Gourmet magazine, it intrigued me. Crispy bits of chorizo sausage, buttery chickpeas, and the crunch of toasted almonds sounded perfect. And this pasta dish was terrific, as long as you cast aside any preconceived notions as to what pasta should be like, in the Italian sense. This is not an al dente dish. The body that comes from this dish is not coming from the swollen angel hair noodles, it is coming from the other Spanish ingredients added to the [...]

I have always had a rather tumultuous relationship with chorizo sausage. It is not that I don’t love the spicy flavor, the gentle kick you get from cooking it in any dish. Because I do. What I don’t love is the grease, that slick of orange oil that seeps out of the chorizo and onto, say, your huevos rancheros, giving them a gleaming orange cast. Not good. But when I saw celebrity chef Rick Bayless, use chorizo sausage meat as a robust filling for tacos, I knew that I would have to give it a try– grease be gone!
It turns out the taco filling was not greasy at all, and there were a few reasons for this. It wasn’t simply chorizo that I was frying up for the tacos, it was a myriad of other things as well, giving the grease a purpose for being there. There were [...]