When life hands you slightly sub-par pork tenderloin, make…just be really happy you signed up for Boccalone’s Tasty Salted Pig Parts! I can’t really figure out what happened to the gorgeous bright pink tenderloin I bought Sunday, but when it came out of the refrigerator Monday evening, it had decidedly decided to forgo being dinner, despite my intentions to roast it perfectly and serve it medium rare, sliced thinly, with a potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

But with one pig part having to go in the bin, it was a perfect opportunity to use Boccalone’s breakfast sausages. Everybody likes breakfast for dinner, right? The sausages were marvelous, with the slight sweetness you’d want from a breakfast sausage but complicated by orange juice and zest, which really made it. They would have been delicious, no doubt, with a poached egg and mimosa—but they did just fine with this goat-cheese quinoa and steamed Mariquita carrots tossed in butter and dill. I even went for a little tiny touch of that excellent mustard that would have gone into the potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

Alli was probably relieved for the breakfast sausages. Without those, I would have pushed hard for Boccalone Coppa di testa sandwiches. Mmmm. Coppa di testa sandwich.

We’re still new to each other, blog, but I feel okay confessing to you that I made the grave, youthful, (forgive me, blog!) mistake of being was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life. That’s 38%, roughly. God. But I am doing my best to make up for lost time, and Boccalone is really helping me out in this respect. Still, at the end of the day, that’s about four thousand days that I could have had duck confit instead of some unpleasant Tofurkey.