Lend Me Your Ears... With Some Broccoli Rabe and Sausage

I always say that broccoli rabe is a very controversial vegetable. Many people don't like the bitterness of rabe and people are often scared away from cooking it because they don't know how to get the right flavor from it. The key to perfecting broccoli rabe, I learned from my girlfriend, is a little bit of sugar. For whatever reason, sugar creates the perfect sweet balance to the bitter green and makes it a lot friendlier and less intimidating. Other elements that will remove bitterness are sausage and ricotta. A classic Italian dish is orecchiette with sausage, broccoli, rabe, and ricotta. Orecchiette literally means small ear as it is a pasta that resembles the shape of an ear. What is nice about using this type of pasta in this dish is that the orecchiette act as little bowls that hold the ricotta and sausage, making each bite complete and full of all flavors of the dish. The result is a creamy, salty, rich dish that is surprisingly easy to make. The version I made was beautiful and satisfying with a nice balance of sweet and salt with a bit of spice and creaminess to top it off.

Mushroom, Oyster, and Sausage Stuffing

I am a big fan of Thanksgiving stuffing, but when you think of it conceptually, it’s a pretty silly dish. You take croutons or toasted bread, douse it in stock, mix it with meat, veggies, shellfish, or anything else you want, and bake it. You’re basically taking bread, drying it out, moistening it up, mixing it with some other ingredients and then drying it out again. It’s almost like a very confused sandwich (and for anyone who’s had a Thanksgiving sandwich, that is an even bigger and more delicious conundrum) For our stuffing this year, we made two variations on the same theme. Both of them were basic mushroom and sausage stuffing, but one was made with oysters, walnuts and cornbread.

A Breakfast Standard With a Savory Twist

Sometimes you can take standard dishes, tweak them a little bit, and they become something totally different. French Toast is a weekend brunch standard that is normally on the sweet side of things along with pancakes, waffles, and pastries. I'm usually a savory brunch kind of guy, so I decided to take what is normally sweet, and bring it to the other side.

A (Kind of) Spooky Halloween Meal

This Halloween, I was not really in the dress-up spirit. I normally come up with an original idea for a costume, but for some reason, this was not my year for good costume ideas. The impromptu snowstorm on Saturday didn't help matters. Instead of coming up with some half baked idea, I decided to channel my creativity into creating a Halloween themed meal. I decided on roasted and mashed butternut squash, crispy purple kale chips, and stuffed calamari with blueberry sauce.

Is that watermelon in a sandwich??

It sure is! I love the flavor of watermelon in the summer. It's a melon with such a sweet flavor and interesting mouthfeel. Whenever I have some watermelon, I'm instantly transported to somewhere near the beach (figuratively, otherwise I would be eating watermelon non-stop...) Watermelon is normally eaten in wedges or cut up pieces. For this meal, I wanted to use it in an unconventional way. I decided to pair the sweet watermelon with the salty, meatiness of sausages in a sandwich. To go alongside this unconventional sandwich pairing, I decided to make some fried zucchini to make a sandwich and some chips a truly unexpected meal.

I see that it's pasta, but where's the sauce??

In keeping with my health conscious eating, I wanted to make a healthy pasta dish that was not just wheat pasta with tomato sauce. I had some chicken sausage, a red pepper, onion, garlic, and a whole bunch of herbs. I made a simple dish that packed a lot of flavor, was very healthy (the only salt was a little from the sausage and some to taste), and was off the beaten path for a sausage pasta dish.
I started by thinly slicing the chicken sausage and sauteeing it in olive oil. Once all of the slices were browned, I set the sausage aside and added the chopped pepper and onion. Once they were cooked through, I added the sausage back in along with some garlic, chopped thyme and rosemary, and let that cook for a few minutes. While this was cooking, I boiled some whole wheat pasta. I added some chicken broth to the sausage mixture, tossed in the pasta, some parmesan and a bunch of whole basil leaves. I added a little black pepper for a little bit of spice and served. The outcome was an unexpected pasta dish that had the feeling of a puttanesca sauce without the anchovies and olives.