Meat Thing

Inspired by Melissa Clark's piece in the Times a few weeks back, I decided to make some free-form sausages. Or rather I continued to make highly flavored mounds of ground meat like always, but now thought of them as sausages.

I went with the Merguez or cigar shape, though it might be compared to something else by a middle schooler. Using ground beef from Codman, I mixed it with almost equal parts onion, plus salt, pepper, and loads of pimenton. We were going to grill them over wood, so the smoked paprika might have seemed redundant. But who doesn't want meat to taste smokier?

It worked. They were so good.