I’ve learned to cook! Now, while I still say, “good luck” and not “Bon appetit”, when I serve, — I haven’’t set a pot holder on fire in quite a while. Now, instead of burning food, I caramelize it!

The hardest part of cooking, besides timing, is deciding what to have for dinner, oh and using the right ingredients. (There’s a big difference between cream of tarter and tarter sauce.)

I find having a freezer full of food helps. Ours is stocked, not only with blueberries, raspberries, and bananas for smoothies, I also freeze leftover soup for those times when I don’t feel like cooking. And, we buy meat and fish in bulk from the butcher. I like having a choice on hand, when I think about what’s for dinner.

And, while I have plenty of cookbooks on the shelf, the inter-web is my go-to place for new recipes. All I have to do is talk to the google, and I have a plethora of options with the ingredients of my choice.

The other day, I saw what looked like a tasty meal made with sausage and cabbage. I watched the youtube cooking lesson, and knew it was in my wheelhouse of culinary skills!

I have several varieties of sausage to choose from in the freezer. So, I grabbed some turkey links to de-frost, and gathered the other ingredients in ready.

I don’t plan when quilting, but I’ve learned when cooking, you really do need to use the ingredients the recipe calls for IF you want the meal to come out well. The French technique of mise en place helps a lot when cooking. I set all the ingredients in the recipe out before I begin.

Anyway – yesterday, I had the counter full of chopped onion, grated garlic, sliced cabbage, corn, peas, soy sauce and sesame oil at the ready for my yummy meal.

Once all this was ready, I needed to cook the sausage.

I told you we buy meat in bulk, so I usually repackage the meat into smaller portions before I put it in the freezer. This had been done with the sausage, so I didn’t think much about it, when I opened the baggie to start cooking up the meat — but… dang it, something was weird.

The sausage was mushy. I knew it was defrosted, but this was too much. I wanted to cut the casing off the link, to fry it up, but…. something was really off. Something just wasn’t right with this meat… too mushy… the meat had no structure… I was genuinely confused, as I know we buy from a quality source.

I messed with it a bit more… I smelled it… uhm….

Bananas.

Not sausage — bananas. I’d thawed a pound of bananas.

Bananas do not go all that well with cabbage, onions and ginger.

I’m just saying.