A Down-and-Dirty, Last-Minute Fourth of July BBQ

The situation: Since your house has a view, your friends have elected you to be the host of the fireworks party.

The problem: You haven't had time to even think about what to cook.

The solution: A menu of grilled sausages with spicy mustard, German potato salad, fruit kabobs and chilled raspberry cream pie.

• Rosamunde Sausage Grill (545 Haight St., 415-437-6851) doesn't just make the best sausages in SF, they sell them uncooked too. Our perennial favorite is the spicy beer sausage. Pick up as many as you need ($3 a sausage) and while you're at it, add in some of their great potato salad to-go.

• Of course, a sausage is only as good as its bun, so stop by Bi-Rite for some made Acme Bakery.

• Of course, a sausage and bun is only as good as its mustard. Boccalone, in the Ferry Building, makes a whole-grain mustard that's so spicy it goes right up your nose. In a good way.

• While you're at the Ferry Building, you might as well get some fresh fruit at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Fruit salad looks much cooler when it's threaded onto skewers to make fruit kabobs of sorts. I'm envisioning alternating wedges of nectarines, halves of strawberries and blueberries. (Although if you could find a white melon, like a Sharlyn, and made it with the strawberries and blueberries, then you'd have red, white and blue!)

• If you'd rather make your own potato salad, I favor the warm German kind with bacon, like this one from Chow.

• Dessert? Try this easy, old-school chilled raspberry cream pie, a recipe from my great grandmother that ran in Rachael Ray magazine once. Skip the homemade crust and buy a premade, all-butter shell from Whole Foods in the freezer section.

Fourth of July barbecue? Done and done.