sausage – Mel's Mosaic

Had Supper Club at my place awhile back and it was right before Halloween (yes, catching up on writing many posts). The theme I chose was Orange & Black, meaning that anything people cooked had to contain something of/with those colors. I came across a recipe in Food & Wine, Sausage-and-Potato Pan Roast, that with some slight alterations to the ingredients would fit the theme.

Active: 20 minutes Total Time: 50 minutes Servings: 4-6

Ingredients

2 large red potatoes, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
2 Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into 1-inch wedges
1 large baking potato, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
**for the potatoes overall, I used fingerlings, several medium reds and a sweet (for my orange color)
10 medium unpeeled shallots, halved
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing
Kosher salt and pepper
1 1/2 pounds sweet Italian sausage, cut into 3-inch lengths **I grabbed chicken sausage from Trader Joe’s
One 8-ounce bunch of arugula, stemmed and chopped
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Prep

Preheat the oven to 425°. On a large rimmed baking sheet, toss all of the potatoes with the shallots and the 1/3 cup of olive oil. Season generously with salt and pepper. Roast for about 15 minutes, until the potatoes are lightly browned. Brush the sausage with olive oil and add to the baking sheet. Roast for 20 to 25 minutes longer, until the potatoes are tender and the sausage is cooked through.

Transfer everything on the baking sheet to a platter. Fold in the arugula and lemon juice, season with salt and pepper and serve.

This stuff was delicious! So easy to make, too. Definitely added this to my default list for recipes to make.

January, cold, soup weather. It was the perfect day to make something nice and hot for dinner, especially since I hadn’t made a one-pot wonder for awhile. I flipped through several cookbooks looking for a recipe I hadn’t made yet (because I wanted to try something new) and came across a Portuguese Green Soup in my Bon Appetit book. Basic ingredients, could make some changes to use what I had, and sounded delicious.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch collard greens, center stems cut away, leaves thinly sliced — or sort of chopped/cut into pieces
1 pound fully cooked spicy sausage (such as linguiça, andouille, or hot links), cut into 1/2-inch-thick rounds — I used venison roast that I had and cubed it
5 3/4 cups low-salt chicken broth
1 3/4 pounds russet potatoes, peeled, diced — why peel them? There is great stuff in the skin!
1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper

Preparation

Heat olive oil in large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic. Saute until onion is soft and golden , about 5 minutes. Note: my apartment smelled SO good.

Add collard greens and saute until wilted, about 4 minutes.

Add sausage (or venison in my case) and saute 5 minutes.

Add broth and potatoes. Simmer soup uncovered until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.

Transfer 2 cups soup (without sausage) to processor. Blend until smooth; return to pot of soup and bring to simmer. Mix in crushed red pepper. Season with salt and black pepper.

This is where immersion blenders are heaven!!! Now, it was hard to totally avoid the meat here but it made it kind of cool in the end. I made it not super smooth but not super chunky.

It was a very nice soup. As mentioned, the meat was sort of ‘smoothed’ out from the immersion blender. I had to add more salt — don’t know if it’s because sausage can often have more salt (and the recipe doesn’t call for any to begin with, they mention to add it at the end). I added some garlic salt to give it some more kick. But, I like this recipe. It says 4 dinner servings. Definitely! I have plenty of soup to go around.