A Collaborative Ladies Night Effort: Sausage, Apple, and Cheese Pie

Too many cooks in the kitchen? Yes please. My kitchen, though pretty functional, is narrow and small, but my favorite way to cook is with my lady friends, glasses of red wine in one hand, knives in the other. Seems precarious, but we seem to have it down.

So much for eating lighter meals after the new year, but sometimes after the stress of the holidays, you need to eat things such as this sausage/cheese pie that Kate, Meghan and I made the other week. But hey, it has apples in it! The photos are kind of crappy, but eating it was the higher priority here.

We used a deep dish pie dish, so Meghan increased the amount of pie dough a bit, and we used a whole onion instead of half and a pound of sausage instead of 3/4 pound. I think deep dish may be the way to go, since you end up with a lot of filling.

Sausage, Apple, and Cheese Pie
From: Simply Recipes

Ingredients

1 basic pie dough recipe, such as this one, or one of your choosing
2 large green apples, peeled and thinly sliced
1 medium onion, chopped
1 teaspoon sugar
3 tablespoons butter
3/4 lb sweet Italian sausage, removed from casings
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cups shredded fontina, provalone, and or asiago cheese
1 cup ricotta cheese
1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
2 eggs, slightly beaten

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Using a fork, poke holes all over your pie crust, creating vents. Pre-bake the crust for about 12-15 minutes, or until dough is just beginning to brown. Reduce heat to 350 degrees.

2. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add the apples, onions, and sugar and cook, stirring occasionally, until the apples and onions are tender (about 5 minutes).  Add the garlic and cook briefly, until fragrant. Transfer mixture to a bowl.

3. In the same skillet, add the sausage. Cook, stirring only occasionally, until sausage is browned and cooked through. Remove sausages with a slotted spoon to separate from remaining fat, and pat with paper towels to remove excess juices.

4. In a medium sized bowl, mix together the cheeses and eggs.

5. In the pre-baked pie crust, add sausages, topped with the apple/onion mixture. Pour the cheese mixture on top, spreading it evenly over the pie. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes and let cool for a few minutes before serving.


Assembling:

Mushroom Polenta with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe

I have a tendency to over-buy ingredients when cooking for more than just myself, but my dad has this problem to the umpteenth degree. I was lucky to profit from this when I was home the other day and my dad bought about quadruple the amount of sausage needed for a recipe my mom was cooking. They sent me back to Brooklyn with the rest of the sausage. It was garlic and pork sausage and came from Frank and Maria's Italian Pork Store in Bay Shore, Long Island. Nice place.

I'd never even heard of garlic pork sausage before! It was good, but I imagine you could use any kind of sausage for this dish, as I just threw it in with some other ingredients. I'm not sure where I got the idea to use polenta, but it worked. You can really play around a lot with the ingredients... add more or less salt and pepper, change the spices, switch up the veggies, etc.

This recipe could probably feed about 4 people for dinner.

Ingredients

For the polenta:

2 cups dried polenta (ground cornmeal)
6 cups water
1 teaspoon Kosher salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 package mushrooms, sliced and sauteed
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning (or a mix of dried rosemary and thyme)
Salt and pepper, to taste

For the rest:

1 bunch broccoli rabe (about a pound), chopped and ends trimmed about an inch
2 cloves garlic, slivered
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 - 1 1/2 pound(s) sausage
Grated cheese (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place sausage in an oven safe dish and cook for about 40 minutes or until the sausage starts to brown. When finished cooking, cut sausage into 1 inch pieces.

2. Meanwhile, bring water and 1 teaspoon salt to boil in a large pot. Stir in dried polenta. Reduce heat to low and let simmer uncovered for about 30 minutes. Stir frequently; the polenta will get very thick.

3. While keeping an eye on/stirring the polenta, saute mushrooms in about a tablespoon of olive oil until tender.

4. In a separate pan, saute the broccoli rabe and slivered garlic in 3 tablespoons of olive oil, until broccoli rabe is tender (or still a little crunchy, if you prefer that). Season both mushrooms and broccoli rabe with salt and pepper.

5. When polenta is about ready, stir in mushrooms, minced garlic, and Italian seasoning (or other seasonings). Add salt and pepper to taste.

6. Top polenta with sausage and broccoli rabe. Add some grated cheese if you like!

Kim's Sausage and Peppers

It must be Williamsburg's Italian feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola that got me in the mood for sausage and peppers. Why I'd use the oven in 90 degree weather when I could have just popped over to the festival, I'm not quite sure...

This is based on my sister's recipe for sausage and peppers, with a few additions that I've played around with the last few times I've made it. A certain someone convinced me to make my own sauce this time, which makes it slightly less of a quick meal, but at least it got me into trying to work on homemade sauces. Still, this works well with a large jar of pre-made sauce from the grocery store, also making it a fast weeknight meal.

I used a Bittman basic tomato sauce recipe, and it came out a little thin, but this might have been because I put too many minced onions in it, which became watery in the food processor. I think it might have been fine otherwise, and it seems like a good starter recipe for making your own sauce.

The sauce recipe below is doubled because the sausage and peppers recipe makes a ton of food, and I like to have some extra sauce on hand. If you want to make less food, you can halve both the sauce and sausage and pepper measurements.

Tomato Sauce

6 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced, or 1 small onion, minced
2 (28-ounce) cans whole plum tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons Italian seasonings, or a mixture or dried basil, oregano, etc... I think you can be pretty creative here with whichever seasonings you like... Bittman left these out though.

1. Warm 4 tablespoons of the oil with the garlic or onion in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is lightly golden or the onion is translucent.

2. Drain the tomatoes and crush them with a fork or your hands and add them to the skillet with salt and pepper. Raise the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture becomes "saucy" (about 10 minutes). Stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil, and add salt to taste.

Sausage and Peppers

1-2 packages (depending on how much sausage you want) hot Italian sausages (or mild if you prefer)
3 green peppers
3 red peppers
1 large onion

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Slice peppers and onions and mix into a 13x9 oven safe pan with the sausages sliced into 1 inch sections. The oil from the sausages will cook the peppers and onions. Cook for about 40 minutes or until the sausages are browned and the peppers and onions are soft.

3. Mix sausage and pepper mixture with tomato sauce in a large pot on the stove, and heat up for another 10 minutes or so.

4. Serve over pasta with Italian bread.


One day I'll try to make sauce using fresh tomatoes, but canned works for now!

I think I need to get a bigger pan here...

The whole shebang: