Hello Reader,

How are you? I hope you had a brilliant week. Life for me is going splendidly. I am loving life. I couldn’t be happier, personally. Professionally, it’s excellent and exciting. The last couple of days have been exceptional at work.

Want to avoid the silly sausage story? Here’s the recipe!

Democracy sausage (roll)

Today we get an opportunity to exercise our right to a free and fair vote for members of the House of Representatives and jurisdictional senators in the Australian Senate.

It’s become a ‘thing’, almost a tradition, for voters to consume a democracy sausage while lined up waiting to vote or after they’ve done the deed.

In its most basic form, a democracy sausage is a snag¹ cooked on an outdoor hotplate and served in a folded slice of the cheapest white bread. There is no butter, the fat from the sausage being sufficient to lubricate the snag and offer some moisture to the dry bread. Some people will provide tomato or barbecue sauce. I’ve seen some people combine both the tomato and barbecue sauces and have it with their sausage. I will not judge them.

We now see all manner of diversity in terms of the sausage sandwiches. There are vegetarian and vegan sausages. The bread can be gluten-free or sourdough or multi-grain, or any other type of bread.

Apart from the sauce, extras often include cooked onions, and we get the debate of onions under or over the sausage². Some people have kimchi, others sauerkraut, and others also have cheese.

My democracy sausage was a sausage roll because that’s how I roll 😉

Last night, I got home late and felt like making fried rice with tinned corned beef. I made it spicy with some Bird’s-eye chillies.

My democracy sausage (roll) is leftover spicy corned beef fried rice in puff pastry.

While I’m having a little fun here, I’m conscious that there are foreign governments that do not hold free and fair elections. I respect the right of a foreign government to conduct itself sovereignly. While not a fan of the United Nations nor any of its derivative organisations, I hope that humankind will enjoy total freedom and an abundance of life.

Back to the soup!

Ingredients

• Cauliflower
• Potato
• White onion
• Leek
• Bacon
• Laksa paste (a commercial paste because life is too short)
• White peppercorns
• Vegetable stock
• White wine
• Gorgonzola

Instructions

1. Dissect a cauliflower into florets.
2. Roughly slice a leek. You can be rough with this leek. In the end, it’s all blended.
3. Dice an onion.
4. Dice the spud.
5. Dice the bacon.
6. Pound the white peppercorns in a mortar with a heavy hard pestle. Please give it a good pounding because you don’t want a gritty result from your pounding.
7. Crumble the gorgonzola.
8. Heat a saucepan on a hob.
9. Sauté the bacon to render some fat, and then add the onion and leek to get the aromas in the air, so your kitchen area is rich with fragrance. If you like, you could add garlic too.
10. Add the cauliflower and potato to the cooked bacon, onion, and leek.
11. Cover everything with wine and vegetable stock and add a tablespoon of the laksa paste.
12. Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer until the potato and cauliflower are soft.
13. Turn off the heat and process the soup with a stick blender until smooth.
14. Turn the heat back on to low.
15. Add in the crumbled gorgonzola cheese and season with the pepper to taste.
16. Ladle the soup to a bowl.
17. Place the rest in vacuum bags and, using a vacuum chamber sealing device, seal the bags and freeze for another day.
18. Give thanks to the Lord.
19. Enjoy the soup and ponder life and love and how everything seems to fit together. Each part complements the other elements in life.

Thoughts on the soup

I know cauliflower soup isn’t a favourite for one of my daughters. She dislikes it intensely. For me, though, it has flavour, and the cheese gives it a thickness almost like a sauce. It’s rich and flavourful.

Combining something distinctly Asian and European seems to be a thing with me. Laksa paste and gorgonzola cheese. Who knew?

Final thoughts

1. Is combining laksa paste and gorgonzola cheese an abomination or brilliance on my part? I liked it. You might like it too. Please give it a go and let me know.
2. Does cauliflower give you flatus? I reckon tonight, my freshly laundered sheets will take on a new aroma 😆
3. How do you feel about the democracy sausage? If you’re not Australian, do you have any election traditions?
4. A workmate who saw my sausage roll asked if it counts as a democracy sausage. What do you think?

Footnotes

1. The snag is slang for sausage
2. A local hardware chain, viz., Bunnings, created controversy when it directed all sausage sandwiches sold at its stores not to have onions over the sausage. The management deemed the risk of slipping on dropped onions to be a safety hazard. The direction is to tuck the onion under the meat sac.