Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Sausage and kale. It's crazy delicious.

Once again, it is time to begin a "recipe" with a simple disclaimer: it's not really a "recipe" when it's this easy, but it sure is an astoundingly effing great idea.

The idea? Sausage with kale. "With" as in "cooked together so the kale picks up all that sausage-y flavor."

Guess what the ingredients are?

Yup. Sausage -- you choose what kind, but choose well; factory pork is shit; we chose three pounds of some Italian sausage from the meat counter at Whole Foods, so at least we know Porky was reasonably well-treated before they zapped him -- plus kale. We usually go for the "Dino" kale, but this time got something else (organic). Two bunches.

Chop up the kale. You would be smart to leave out those big vein-y stalks in the middle of each leaf. They are a little chewy. Cut up the sausage. It cooks better that way. Before all that cooking starts, it looks like this:




Put the sausage in a pan on medium-low heat. Cover the pan. Don't rush this operation. It will take 45 minutes to an hour to cook. When it goes in, it looks, unsurprisingly, like this, before you cover it:



Sausage has a hell of a lot of fat in it. There is no need to butter, oil, grease, etc. the pan. It'll throw off enough fatty liquid that eventually, when cooked, it looks like this:



Guess what all that vaguely gross-looking liquid is gonna do? Steam the kale. That's what.
Throw the kale in there (yeah, a seriously bigass pan or Dutch oven is helpful). Right on top of the sausage. Cover it all up. Before it is covered, it looks like you've overdone it a bit in the kale department:





And then it cooks down, and you realize that all you've overdone is the awesome. This takes 15-20 minutes on low-ish heat. Stir the whole thing up, and you're done:



The sausage tastes like sausage. The kale tastes like sausage. You're welcome. Now stop telling me this cooking stuff is hard or that you don't know what to cook.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like 'Pinkel', which is a staple dish of Northern Germany. I visited Bremen a couple of years ago and got seriously hooked. If you're ever there, you must try it.

    I love German food...

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  2. Text message I just got after showing someone this page: http://imgur.com/a89bHdH

    ReplyDelete