My sister gave me Fine Cooking Cook Fresh: 150 Recipes for Cooking and Eating Fresh Year-Round for Christmas. It's a really exciting recipe book filled with recipes I'm terrified to try but that look fairly doable. I went through the book and marked a bunch of recipes I wanted to try, then I made my partner look at those recipes and identify a few to try one week.
The first recipe we tried was braised sausage with balsamic-glazed onions and grapes. It sounds super fancy, tastes fancy, but was fairly simple to make. Here's the only picture I took of it (I didn't think to do so earlier in the process) plus the summary.
I'd like to give a couple little disclaimers:
Ingredients
3 Tbs olive oil
8 links (about 2 lb.) sweet Italian sausage, pricked with a fork
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup lower-salt chicken broth
2 Tbs balsamic vinegar
20 seedless red grapes, halved
2 Tbs chopped fresh oregano
Directions
Heat 1 Tbs olive oil over medium heat, add the sausages and cook, turning every few minutes until they're brown all over. Remove to a large plate.
Add remaining olive oil, onions, and salt and cook until the onion softens and turns light brown. Add the chicken broth and balsamic vinegar and scrape the bottom of the skillet to incorporate browned bits. Reduce to a gentle simmer.
Add sausages and grapes, cover skillet with the lid ajar, and cook until the sausages are cooked, about 25 minutes. Stir occasionally. Serve sprinkled with oregano.
I'd say the fresh oregano is worth it, but we had a ridiculously hard time finding it in stores right after the holidays. You can probably sub dried, which I'll do if I can't find fresh easily. It's actually suggested you serve with baguette and a salad, which is how we ended up with the above salad. If you need to stay gluten-free, don't do the baguette or substitute something gluten-free. The whole thing took maybe 45 minutes including prep (which includes slicing the onion and grapes). We ate leftovers for a week. When you eat the leftovers, just watch that initially some coagulated fat will be on the top. Just scrape it off and reheat.
The book has some commentary I didn't copy out. It's written so that someone like my partner, who can cook a bit but not much, can follow the directions. It describes how the oil should look before you add the sausage and what temperatures to use at which stage. It also tells you to cut into the sausage at the end to figure out if it's cooked. Seriously, this book is awesome. I recommend finding it.
The first recipe we tried was braised sausage with balsamic-glazed onions and grapes. It sounds super fancy, tastes fancy, but was fairly simple to make. Here's the only picture I took of it (I didn't think to do so earlier in the process) plus the summary.
Salad, baguette, and sausage dinner
I'd like to give a couple little disclaimers:
- I really don't like vinegar that much. I like pickles, but vinegar itself is gross (remnant from my first job mixing giant vats of coleslaw at KFC). That said, this is good and doesn't taste like vinegar at all.
- We didn't use fancy anything. The sausage was the prepackaged store brand sausage from the meat department. I wager fancier stuff would taste even better.
Ingredients
3 Tbs olive oil
8 links (about 2 lb.) sweet Italian sausage, pricked with a fork
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup lower-salt chicken broth
2 Tbs balsamic vinegar
20 seedless red grapes, halved
2 Tbs chopped fresh oregano
Directions
Heat 1 Tbs olive oil over medium heat, add the sausages and cook, turning every few minutes until they're brown all over. Remove to a large plate.
Add remaining olive oil, onions, and salt and cook until the onion softens and turns light brown. Add the chicken broth and balsamic vinegar and scrape the bottom of the skillet to incorporate browned bits. Reduce to a gentle simmer.
Add sausages and grapes, cover skillet with the lid ajar, and cook until the sausages are cooked, about 25 minutes. Stir occasionally. Serve sprinkled with oregano.
I'd say the fresh oregano is worth it, but we had a ridiculously hard time finding it in stores right after the holidays. You can probably sub dried, which I'll do if I can't find fresh easily. It's actually suggested you serve with baguette and a salad, which is how we ended up with the above salad. If you need to stay gluten-free, don't do the baguette or substitute something gluten-free. The whole thing took maybe 45 minutes including prep (which includes slicing the onion and grapes). We ate leftovers for a week. When you eat the leftovers, just watch that initially some coagulated fat will be on the top. Just scrape it off and reheat.
The book has some commentary I didn't copy out. It's written so that someone like my partner, who can cook a bit but not much, can follow the directions. It describes how the oil should look before you add the sausage and what temperatures to use at which stage. It also tells you to cut into the sausage at the end to figure out if it's cooked. Seriously, this book is awesome. I recommend finding it.
No comments:
Post a Comment