Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sausage, apple and sweet potato casserole (first cooking post on BlogAsheville)

BlogAsheville admin Jen Saylor invited me to post a recipe from my foodie blog, the occasion to post being that I'm using some key local ingredients. The sweet potatoes and the collards are from our CSA box that we get from Flying Cloud Farm in Fairview.

This was first posted on my food blog, Yes We Cook! which is a shared blog for which I do most of the posts lately. I am the most frequent poster there but not the only one.

4saus

That photo looks like it's all sweet potato, and it wasn't at all.

So I had some chicken hot italian sausages. These are really good natural sausages. They do not have that weak chicken sausage flavor so many chicken sausages have. So if I didn't know these were great sausages and you prefer pork, then I'd go with pork for this recipe.

1saus

I browned about a pound of sausage. I took off the skins and sauteed it like ground meat. Before I did the saute I boiled a massively huge sweet potato. Two regular sized large sweet potatoes would do. These are from the CSA box we're getting so nothing is typical which is lovely because you know it's not been genetically modified or altered in any way for it to look "normal" for the grocery store. So I cut up the potato in pieces and boiled it.

After the sausage was cooked I put it on the bottom of an 8 x 8 baking dish. I topped that with a layer of thinly sliced apple.

I mashed the potatoes once they were cooked and added salt. Then I put this over the apples and sausage. I baked it covered for 1/2 an hour at 400 degrees and then uncovered for 20 minutes.

2saus

I had no idea how this would turn out except I had a vague memory of liking pork sausage with sweet potatoes---where I got this idea I didn't know. My husband later reminded me I used to get an egg scramble in a restaurant we used to frequent in which there was both a hefty amount of sweet potatoes and sausage. The apple was a new addition. I wasn't sure if I'd like it but I did and in fact I loved it!

3saus

Served it with (also) local collard greens from the CSA box for an all around Southern feel.

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