Winter Sausage & Pepper Couscous

There are certain smells that can take you right back to being a kid.

For me, Italian sausage cooking with peppers always reminds me of a church basement.

I believe it was February of 1978. We had gotten quite a bit of snow that winter, and my parents took me to a spaghetti supper at a church a few towns over.

I want to say it was St. Matthew's.

It might have been St. Mark's.

I know it was a saint.

Anyway, they held the supper in the basement, which was a large room with beige walls, long folding tables, and those metal chairs that made a terrible scraping noise whenever somebody stood up.

Everyone had tracked snow inside, so there were little puddles all over the linoleum floor. It smelled like wet boots, coffee, and Italian sausage.

Mostly Italian sausage.

There was a very large silver coffee urn on a table near the kitchen, one of those enormous things with a little red light on the front. My father said it took forty-five minutes to make coffee. I thought that was a long time to wait for something you could drink in five minutes.

Several older ladies seemed to be in charge of the urn. Nobody under sixty was allowed near it.

I don't know if that was an actual church rule or just something everybody understood.

My mother had volunteered to help clean up, which meant I'd volunteered to help clean up, although I don't recall anybody asking me. My job was to collect empty paper plates and carry them to the kitchen.

It wasn't difficult work, but it involved quite a bit of walking around, and I'd already gotten snow in one of my boots..

Near the kitchen was a long table where they were making Italian sausage sandwiches.

There was a big skillet full of sausages, green peppers, onions, and a few red peppers. The whole basement smelled wonderful.

A teenage boy was working behind the table.

He was probably seventeen or eighteen. He had curly dark hair, a white apron, and a very large pair of metal tongs.

I thought he had a terrific job.

He got to stand behind the table, turn the sausages, and hand sandwiches to people. Nobody was asking him to collect paper plates.

He also seemed to know exactly what he was doing with those tongs.

I remember standing there watching him for a while.

Eventually he looked down at me and asked, "You want a sausage sandwich, buddy?"

I said yes.

He put a sausage on a roll and asked if I wanted peppers.

I said yes again.

He piled some peppers on top, handed me the sandwich on a paper plate, and said, "There you go, buddy."

I thought that was just about the nicest thing anybody had said to me all evening.

I wasn't used to older boys calling me buddy. Usually they just told me to get out of the way.

I took my sandwich over to one of the folding tables and sat down.

It was a very good sandwich.

The peppers were soft and a little sweet, and the sausage had those brown spots on the outside that you get when it cooks in a skillet.

The paper plate was already getting soggy, so I had to hold it with both hands.

My mother eventually found me and asked what happened to the empty plates I was supposed to be collecting.

I told her I was eating.

She pointed out that we were at a spaghetti supper.

I told her I knew that.

I don't believe I ate any spaghetti that evening.

I'm told there was spaghetti.

After I finished eating, I went back to the sausage table to see if they needed any help.

They did not.

The boy was still working with the tongs, and I stood there for another minute until my mother came over and told me to stop bothering the nice young man.

I wasn't bothering him.

He had asked me two questions, and I had answered both of them.

I didn't see what the problem was.

I did eventually go back to collecting plates.

I remember the church had a big wooden cabinet along one wall where they kept all the folding chairs. I thought that was a clever arrangement because you could make the whole room disappear when you were finished with it.

Well, not the room.

The furniture.

You know what I mean.

I haven't been to a church spaghetti supper in many years. I imagine they still have those coffee urns. I hope somebody has replaced the folding chairs.

The boy at the sausage table called me "buddy" twice that evening. I thought about that quite a bit afterward. At seven years old, it seemed like a very grown-up thing to be called.

I started calling other people buddy myself for a while. My father asked me once why I was calling him that. I told him it was just something people said.

I don't believe he was convinced.

I still call people buddy occasionally. I hadn't thought about where I picked it up until I started writing this recipe.

I make a summer couscous dish with pepperoni and several kinds of hot peppers. It's one of my favorites when the weather is warm and there are fresh peppers around.

In the winter, I like something a little heartier.

So I replace the pepperoni with Italian sausage, and the hot peppers with bell peppers, sweet peppers and a few mushrooms. I soften the vegetables in a skillet first, then brown the sausage right in with them, and stir everything together with pearl couscous and a little Parmesan cheese. The couscous soaks up whatever the sausage leaves behind.

The sausage gives everything a nice rich flavor, and the sweet peppers remind me of those sandwiches they served in the church basement.

It's a simple supper, and you don't have to stand around waiting forty-five minutes for the coffee.

Now, I realize that in my summer recipe I said I would probably keep the pepperoni because some things don't need improving.

I stand by that.

This isn't an improvement.

It's February.