Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

The pasta that starts in the freezer

Smoky sausage, softened peppers and a glossy tomato-pesto sauce make this the kind of pasta weeknights deserve

Published August 25, 2026 10:30AM (EDT)

A version of this recipe first appeared in The Bite, Salon's food newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this, plus recipes, food-related pop culture recommendations and conversations about what we're eating, how and why.

For most of last fall, kielbasa was always on sale at my local Mariano’s.

Not dramatically on sale, in the way of a holiday ham wearing a fluorescent sticker that announces some brief and glorious collapse in the market. Just quietly, persistently cheap: usually less than $2.50 for a hefty rope, week after week, as though someone in purchasing had made a tremendous kielbasa-related miscalculation and the rest of us were being invited to help clean it up.

It didn’t even live with the other sausages.

Instead, the kielbasa occupied a low, open refrigerated case near the eggs, one of those cases where you occasionally find yourself reaching a hand all the way toward the bottom, just to reassure yourself that, yes, everything still feels properly chilled. It was a strange little society of meats that belonged neither behind the butcher counter nor among the premium lunch meats — the thin-sliced turkey in its tidy package, the glossy hunk of honey ham. There were cubes of ham. There were anonymous packages of bologna. There was kielbasa, in several permutations: smoked, turkey, pork-and-beef.

I don’t exactly dream of kielbasa.

A golden roast chicken is dream-worthy. A roast chicken can be imagined burnished and fragrant,........

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