Sausage and Veggie Bake

I got this recipe via Pinterest from here. It looked delicious, and since I had today off work, I thought it would be a nice cold-weather, stay-at-home-all-afternoon kind of dinner to make. I was so right.

I promise I'll get better at photographing the food I post here...

I made a few slight adjustments to the original recipe for personal taste, so instead of retyping her recipe, I'll tell you what I did.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound baby carrots
1 pound potatoes (I used white potatoes)
1/2 a large onion
1/2 a red bell pepper
4 sausages (I used beer brats)
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp (ish) shallot-pepper seasoning
salt to taste
4 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

Equipment:
Oven
Pyrex baking dish (or roasting pan if you have one... I don't)
aluminum foil
pan (for sausages)

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 450F. Wash, peel, and cube your potatoes (about 1.5 - 2 inch cubes). Cut your onion half into wedges. Slice your bell pepper half into strips. Put all of these in the Pyrex dish or roasting pan. In a bowl, combine the broth, oil, Italian seasoning, and garlic. Mix it together and pour over the veggies in the pan. Sprinkle with salt and shallot-pepper seasoning. Cover tightly with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Brown sausages in a pan (they don't have to cook all the way through). After 45 minutes, the veggies should be fork-tender. (If they aren't, cook them until they are.) Cut the sausages into quarters and add them to the pan. Add the balsamic vinegar evenly across the top. Return to the oven uncovered for 15 minutes. Using a spoon, distribute juices and turn over sausages/veggies. Bake another 5-10 minutes. Enjoy!

Yields: 4 servings

Total time: about 1.5 hours

Cleanup rating: 2/5
The balsamic vinegar makes quite a mess in the Pyrex dish, but other than rinsing out your measuring implements and your sausage pan, this is the only thing you really need to clean.

Difficulty rating: 3/10
There are four skills required: cut vegetables into even-sized pieces, measure things properly, brown sausages, and pay attention to a timer. The only things that would get in the way of me making this would be not having the time (if I'm cooking when I get home from work, I want it done in 30 minutes or less, not 90) or not having the ingredients. Or having eaten it three times that week already...

Flavor rating: 10/10
I think I made a great choice getting the beer brats... they went extremely well with the veggies and the balsamic vinegar and everything. YUM. Of course I had seconds. And the best part is, there are leftovers for tomorrow!

I'll leave you with a few work in progress photos:

Browning the brats

Before putting the veggies in the first time.