Cheesy Sausage Bake

I actually made this a while ago... I just forgot to post it. So here it is!

Cheesy Sausage Bake

Ingredients
smoked sausage, 1 package
1 large onion
1 potato
1/2 bag of baby carrots
olive oil
salt, pepper
paprika
sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

Equipment
oven, foil, roasting pan

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400F. Slice the sausage (about the thickness you see in the photo) and dice your onion and potato. Line a roasting pan with foil and drizzle with a little bit of olive oil, spreading it evenly. Put the sausage, onions, and potatoes into the pan and drizzle with olive oil; mix thoroughly with your hands. Sprinkle with sea salt, pepper, and paprika, and toss again to evenly coat. Spread it evenly in the pan. Bake for 45 minutes (stir every 15 minutes) until potatoes are forkable and golden-brown. Turn off the oven. Sprinkle the cheese evenly across the top and return pan to the oven for a few minutes to melt it.

Yields
about 4 servings

Total time
About an hour (about 15 minutes prep time with chopping and tossing, 45 minutes bake time)

Cleanup rating 2/5
The foil lining makes it easy to clean your pan. If you shred your own cheese, you have to clean the grater, which I see as a bit of a pain, but otherwise there isn't much to it.

Difficulty rating 4/10
You have to be present and paying attention the whole hour, because you need to check in and stir it every 15 minutes.

Flavor rating 6/10
It was good. I wasn't blown away by it, but it was very good.

Adjustability: high
You can add or replace ingredients pretty easily (make sure you don't use something that will devolve to mush unless you add it later in the baking process) and you can add whatever spices you want. I think I actually added garlic... I put garlic in everything.

Make it with
...nothing, unless you want to. You've got your veggies, starch, meat, even some cheese in there. I might make a green veggie on the side (peas, broccoli, a green salad) but I didn't this time.

Look, I Made Breakfast

Since Birk and I both had Martin Luther King Jr Day off, we slept in, I made a big breakfast, and he studied while I worked on wedding invitations.

Some of the pancakes were a total mess.

Some looked closed to normal.

And the result.

That's pancakes, sausage, scrambled eggs, and Allie potatoes (yes, they're for breakfast too!).

The only tricky thing about a breakfast like this is timing. The eggs and sausages got cold while I figured out the right pan temperature for pancakes. (To be fair, I used the same pan for sausage, then eggs, then pancakes, so something was going to suffer, temperature-wise.) The potatoes were the warmest thing on the plate because I started them first and they were JUST ready to come out by the time I finished making everything else.

Sausage and Veggie Bake, Revisited

I faced a dilemma today: make something new for dinner so I can blog about it, or remake that incredible sausage and veggie bake from the other night? Well, if you can read post titles, you know that you missed out on reading about red pepper chicken (at least for a few more days).

But I made two little changes to the sausage and veggie bake this time, and they were both improvements.

Change 1:
Instead of cutting the red pepper into strips, I cut it into larger square-like shapes. This kept them from devolving into mush and sadness, and some of them actually got a little bit of char on the skin, which is just... so great.

Change 2:
This one is cheating actually, because it's two changes that led to the same better outcome. First, I lined the pan with foil because the stuck-on bits of potato from last time were brutal. Then - and this one was actually sort of by accident - I put the potatoes in the pan last. Last time, they went in first, so the flat edges of potato were stuck down to the pan and no oil/broth mixture got between them and the pan, making them (say it with me) get stuck to the pan. Almost nothing stuck to the foil, partially due to spraying the foil with Pam and partially due to the potatoes not being flat-side-down to it, allowing the liquid to get all up under everything.

I would share a photo, but we ate every bite. Seriously. We were hungry, and it was delicious. Still a 10/10 recipe.

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.