Are you depressed? Well have a look at my frying pan and you’ll feel a little better. This is the last time I use this cheap frying pan, but I will say that it’s served me well over the years.

So what are we cooking today?

Well I had four small merguez sausages that had to be eaten today and I just didn’t want to just sit there slicing these wieners and dipping them in some nondescript sauce. I decided to experiment a bit and cook them in ouzo and try to wing out a homemade dijonnaise sauce on the fly. Why ouzo? Because we ran out of beer.

So here we go.

The Sausages: Use olive oil, slightly heated, then fry up the sausages until they’re golden.

The Ouzo: Once your sausages are golden, lower the heat to medium-low and pour in 2 cap fulls of ouzo. It’ll boil off pretty quick, and you’re going to be loving the sweet steam that rises up from the frying pan. Let it boil off while rotating your sausages. You can bounce them around the frying pan with the handle too, if you’d like.

The Homemade Dijonnaise: This was a total experiment, and wasn’t close at all to actual dijonnaise. Still, I got the consistency down, and it mostly worked:

2 tablespoons mayonnaise.

1 teaspoon of yellow mustard

1 teaspoon of olive oil

Season with ground pepper and oregano.

Go on. Laugh it up. Is it an insult to Dijonnaise? We don’t care, because it did the job. On its own, it might be better suited as a chip dip. But, when we put it all together, something magical happened!

Putting it all Together: Warm up some pitas in the oven or the microwave. I went microwave this time so that the pitas would stay soft. Warming them up in the oven tends to make them crispy which kind of foils you when you try to wrap them.

Spread some of that chip-dip dijonnaise on your pitas, throw on some lettuce, dice a tomato, lay down your sausage, and wrap it up. Now shove it in your mouth and savor.

The Verdict: VERY flavourful. Remember when I said that something magical happened? Well, the creamy tang of the dijonnaise and the sweet aftertaste of the ouzo-merguez somehow came together to feel both heavy and light all at once. The dijonnaise became actual dijonnaise in the experience, making me forget what the actual ingredients were. I could not taste a hint of yellow mustard, which was how we want it.

Total prep and cooking time was about 20 minutes, which is pretty good on a tight schedule. I’ll be perfecting this one in the future.