Cleaning Out Your Meat Drawer?

Orrechiette with tasso ham and peas

If you're like me, you have a vacuum-pack of Savoie's tasso lying around. And if your tasso is like mine, it cries out to be combined with a sauce of peas and shallots and white wine and cream, thereafter to be applied to a bowl of orrechiette.

I pruned a bit of fat from it, but there's no denying I stole the concept for this recipe from one of my old St. Louis haunts, Riddle's Penultimate Cafe and Wine Bar. A non-fatal encounter with the Riddles' delicious Rigatoni Tassos requires extremely fit arteries.

It is common to use brutal, galooty wines to beat Cajun flavors into submission, but I am against the practice. I got outside of this dish with the help of a Trinitas 2002 Russian River Valley Petite Sirah, an extremely pretty drink that neither hid from my excellent sauce nor challenged it to a duel.