Now before you start reading (and if you didn’t catch the drift from the title of this post), this is a meaty dish. As in, all meat aside from the tortilla, so you’d better like sausage! Now with that said, I’m really not a huge sausage person, but when I came back from Texas, I found myself with a homesick food craving – grilled sausage tacos. This was one of the big foods of my childhood. Any big celebration in Texas seemed to include a huge smoking grill filled with sizzling sausage, sometimes dry, sometimes smothered in BBQ sauce. They don’t really do that here in the NY/NJ area – or at least, not that I have seen! So when this craving hit, I stated emphatically to Mike…Need Sausage Tacos NOW. And off to Whole Foods we went.

Given that we like to make competitions out of things (or maybe it’s just me and Mike’s playing along), we chose two different sausages – Whole Foods fresh Spicy Italian (Mike’s choice) and The Original Brat Hans chicken Andouille sausage (mine) and two BBQ sauces – Annie’s Naturals Organic BBQ Sauce (Mike) and Hot Bone Suckin’ Sauce (me).  And then of course, flour tortillas. So those ingredients, a grill or a broiler; plus, your beverage of choice and you can have an authentic Texas celebration! We sadly had to use a broiler (not QUITE the same) but here are the steps!

Sausage Tacos

2-3 sausage links per person, sliced horizontally into halves

A stack of flour tortillas, the freshest you can find

Your BBQ sauce of choice

Let your broiler get nice and hot while you slice up your sausage. Place the sausage slices on a cookie sheet and slide into broiler. Chat with your friends, pop open a beer or soda, rotate your cookie sheet, chat some more, toss your tortillas into the oven to warm up (you can put them directly on the oven racks or wrap them in foil first), pull out the sausage, plate with the warmed tortillas and serve BBQ sauce on the side. (We did a few samples with the BBQ sauce ON the sausage as it cooked but I honestly didn’t taste a huge difference).

Oh and in case you’re wondering, the Bone Suckin Sauce was the winner by a close margin and while we prefered the Andouille, the Spicy Italian wasn’t half bad (really spicy though, consider yourself warned). Also, you might notice the tortillas look a little toasty…they were and it was entirely because I chatted a bit too much and forgot just how hot that oven was. So keep an eye out…crunchy tortillas make the taco process a little difficult!