A Few of My Favorite Things

So, when I went to prep this week‚s column, I went looking to see what I had on hand so I wouldn‚t have to do a lot of shopping. I found more smoked sausage than I needed to keep on hand, plenty of pasta and rice and some veggies I needed to use up. That made it real easy to put some dinners together that didn‚t take much time and I didn‚t have to buy a lot for. I also really like smoked sausage. Fun fact: the longest smoked sausage measured 1,581 feet 5 in and was made by 3 German gentleman in Ilsfeld-Auenstein, Germany, on May 6, 2011.

Smoked sausage is a smoked meat cooked via the indirect heat of wood smoke. Sausages are meat products consisting of minced or ground meat and spices stuffed into a casing. Some sausages, like Polish kielbasa, French andouille, and Spanish chorizo, get preserved by both smoking and curing. The smoke gives the sausage a distinctive flavor and extends the storage life of the product. Most sausages are a blend of beef, pork and chicken, but with people trying to eat healthier, you can find many different varieties, often of just a single meat. You can even find fish sausage in Britain! These days though, you can also get sausage made vegan or vegetarian that has absolutely no meat in it.

I use turkey sausage because I can‚t have pork. But it‚s worth exploring for better health as well. If you look at the nutritional values, turkey sausage is much lower than pork sausage in saturated fats, which you are supposed to stay away from. It‚s also lower in calories but doesn‚t sacrifice the proteins you get from pork. Matter of fact, if you compare Hillshire Farms smoked sausages, you actually get more protein from the turkey sausage and it has less in the package.

This week, to go with almost all these dinners, I bought salad fixings and made garlic bread out of hot dog buns. We did that a lot growing up and I still do it to this day. A little butter and garlic powder and some time in the oven to toast and you can easily have garlic bread with as much garlic and as little salt as you want. Yum!

Did you know the original casing of sausage was animal intestines?! Beef, sheep and pig were the most common intestines used. Today, most casings are made artificial with cellulose and collagen. One more odd thing, there used to be a black market for sausage! Way back when, the sausages were made with blood. Christianity and the bible forbade the eating of blood so sausage was banned. However, so many people loved it, they created the black market to get the people what they wanted. Crazy! This weekend, make your grocery list and join me in the kitchen for super easy recipes using smoked sausage!