sausage Archives - Mamma's Cooking

3 Easy 10 Minute Meals

The election is now behind us and whoever you voted for, we can all agree its time to move forward! Now we can occupy our brains with the holidays instead! Which unfortunately for many can be just as stressful, especially when you cannot rely on take out. I, like many of you have a endless list of things to do: keep the children alive and fed, go to school meetings, do laundry, clean, pay bills, juggle all the activities, work and do more laundry, so I completely understand that dinner needs to be done in 10 minutes time most nights. Especially with the holidays coming, our time is even more limited. These are three of my go to super fast recipes for when dinner needs to be on the table ASAP and hopefully help keep your stress levels down!

Kielbasa and Peppers with Mashed Sweet Potatoes

kielbasa-and-sweet-potato-10-minute-meal

Ingredients

1 Tablespoon of olive oil

1 Turkey kielbasa (make sure it is GF if you need it to be), diced

1 red pepper, diced

1 green pepper, diced

1 package of already made mashed sweet potatoes (I like Wegman’s) or a couple of large sweet potatoes

Directions

Heat your cast iron skillet (or sauté pan) over medium heat with the olive oil in it. Once hot, add kielbasa and peppers, stirring occasionally. Cook for about 5-7 minutes. While that is cooking follow the instructions on your mashed sweet potatoes (or just microwave a couple of sweet potatoes-remember to poke holes with a fork!- and serve with a little butter, salt and pepper). You can either leave out the kielbasa for a vegetarian meal or substitute leftover turkey, chicken, steak or your favorite already cooked sausage.

Asian noodles are always a hit in my house and are a great option for an easy weeknight meal. Healthy, tasty and a great alternative to take-out.

Asian noodles with shrimp and broccoli

asian-noodles-10-minute-meal

Ingredients

1 package of Maifun Rice Sticks or your favorite noodles (GF if you need them to be)

1 pound of shrimp (frozen or fresh, even faster if already cooked!)

1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped

1/3 cup soy sauce

1/3 cup rice vinegar

¼ teaspoon fish sauce, optional

¼ teaspoon sesame oil

2 teaspoons of ginger (either this stir-in paste from Gourmet Garden or minced fresh)

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 teaspoon onion powder

3 Tablespoons lime juice

4 Tablespoons brown sugar

Directions

Cook noodles according to package. Add the broccoli to noodles with 3 minutes left in cook time. Drain all. Mix the soy sauce, vinegar and rest of the ingredients in a large bowl. Toss noodles and broccoli with sauce. Toss in cooked, peeled shrimp and its ready to serve. I serve it with fresh cilantro, chopped peanuts and a couple splashes of siracha. A squeeze of lime juice is also a great way to finish the dish.

If shrimp are fresh or thawed and not cooked, this can still be a quick meal, as long as they are cleaned and deveined! Here is a quick delicious way to cook them. Mix 1/8 cup vegetable oil, splash of sesame oil, 4 cloves of garlic – minced and juice of ½ a lime. Toss with the shrimp and cook for 3 to 4 minutes each side in a 400 degree oven. Cool, peel and toss with noodles.

This dish is extremely versatile. It would also be great with, zoodles (zucchini noodles), rice or cauliflower rice in place of the noodles. You can easily substitute tofu, scrambled egg, leftover chicken, steak or even turkey from Thanksgiving. It is good hot, room temperature and cold.

Having these jack-of-all trade meals in your back pocket will make dinner easier to make with what you have on hand.

Pasta with Pink Sauce

pasta-with-pink-sauce-10-minute-meal

Ingredients

1-16 once package of spaghetti or your favorite pasta (gluten free of course if you need it to be)

1 jar of pasta sauce (or one 15 ounce can of tomato sauce)

4 ounces (1/2 block) of cream cheese

Directions

Cook pasta according to package. While water is boiling, pour pasta sauce into sauce pan and heat on medium. Add cream cheese and stir until combined. It will be clumpy. While pasta is cooking pour pink sauce into a large serving bowl and then add drained pasta. Stir and serve.

This is a great base to add whatever cooked vegetables, leftover turkey, chicken or shrimp if you like. I recently made this and served steamed green beans on the side. Stop and Shop steam in the bag green beans. My husband liked them more than when I buy green beans, clean them and steam or roast. Lesson learned! I don’t need to exert the energy!

These three easy dinners will hopefully make your busy nights less stressful and your holiday leftovers easier to finish and disguise! What are your favorite ways to use leftover holiday food? Comment and let us know! I am working on creating Pins for Pinterest for these recipes, so for now just follow me on Pinterest or follow this page and you will be the first to know when you can save these recipes!

Bucket list completed and new goals for 2014!

Fourth day into the new year and we are sitting in the house with piles of snow outside warming up after the final round of shoveling. Feels like deja vu from all the storms we had last February. While my kids play bowling on the Wii and my husband is working from home, I am taking a few minutes to give you an update on my cooking bucket list of 2013…oh wait, Neil wants milk and Karina already wants a snack…So back to the bucket list…What’s that Paul? You want some juice?…and this is why I haven’t written a blog in a few months. If I get a chance before complete meltdowns from cabin fever occur, I also want to write my goals for my 2014 cooking bucket list and some new projects.

2013 Cooking Bucket list – COMPLETE!* (and I did 5 of them in December again)

1. Boerevors sausage (South African farmer’s sausage)

I made 5 batches of this sausage tweaking the recipe each time. Over the holidays my dad and I made the best batch so far! That recipe will be a family secret for now 🙂

2. Souffle

I made a chocolate souffle using Martha Stewart’s recipe as a guide. Didn’t rise as much as I wanted it to, but it was gone in 10 minutes!

3. Melk tert (a South African milk tart)

I used my mother’s recipe and it was delicious. Instead of making a crust, I used the mini phyllo shells, which got a little soggy in the fridge overnight. Next time I would either serve them immediately or use the crust in the recipe if making ahead.

4. Pasta

I ended up make canneloni and filling it with ricotta and spinach and serving with tomato sauce. Delicious! Not as thin as they would be had a I used a pasta machine, but thin enough. Karina and I rolled and rolled and rolled until thin. I made a version of a dish I had last year when I went to Mario Batali’s Eatly in NYC.

5. Carbonara

This was delicious! The whole family loved it. I mean, bacon, eggs, cheese, peas and pasta. You really can’t go wrong. Traditional is with spaghetti or linguine noodles but the kids chose the orecchiette.

6. Filet a whole fish

I cleaned and filleted a red snapper. It wasn’t pretty, but I did it and turned it into the most delicious ceviche!

7. Ceviche

This was my favorite. “Cooked” the snapper in lime juice for 4 hours and tossed it with avocado, tomatoes, a little red onion, olive oil and cilantro and ate it with tortilla chips. LOVED IT! Karina even loved it. Now that I’ve done it once though, I will definitely ask the fish monger to clean and filet it for me. Make sure you tell the fishmonger that you are making ceviche and want a fish that was brought in that morning. Call ahead. It is worth it!

8. Paella

This was also a family favorite. I made some spanish chorizo from scratch, brined the chicken using smoked paprika and cumin. Everything came out great, except the mussels. I didn’t time those right and some didn’t open enough. I will definitely make this again!

9. Octopus* – Did not do this the Octopus that were available were on the “Avoid” list of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Seafood Watch.

10. Jam

So I may have copped out a little on this one, but I never said I would do canning 🙂 I just simmered a bunch of berries over the summer that were on the verge of going bad. Strawberries, blueberries and raspberries cooked with a little bit of water, balsamic vinegar and sugar. It was delicious on ice cream and on toast for breakfast.

11. Yorkshire pudding

This was delicious! I will definitely be making this again. It is super easy. So much easier than I thought it would be. I looked at a couple of recipes and used this one from allrecipes.com. I didn’t make a roast that night, so I replaced the beef drippings with beef stock and served it with some leftover sausage and squash.

12. Cream puffs

I used one of my South African cookbooks for this and it was fairly successful. The best discovery was the “mock” pastry cream recipe from the de Villiers, Cook it and Enjoy It. You just whip together a little butter with sweetened condensed milk and lemon juice. Amazing!

For 2014 I have created a bucket list for the year and I’m starting on an ambitious project of cooking a recipe from one of my cookbooks each week, that I have not made before. I have 50 cookbooks, so that gives me 2 weeks off 🙂 Hopefully I will have time to blog about it. If not visit my Facebook page to get updates!

Cooking bucket list for 2014:

1. Rusks (think South African biscotti)

2. Macaroons

3. Scones

4. Brussel Sprouts (I’ve never cooked them. My husband loves them, so I’m taking one for the team so my kids won’t inherit my food prejudices 🙂 )

5. Pretzels

6. Poached Salmon

7. Beef Wellington

8. Coq au Vin

9. Khachapuri (a Georgian cheesy bread)

10. Duck (not necessarily a whole duck, we’ll see how adventurous I feel)

11. Tortillas

12. Chilaquiles (My favorite Mexican breakfast!!)

Happy New Year everyone!

100th post! Sausage done!

I have spent some time thinking about how monumental this 100th post is and thanks to all of you it follows the most successful post I’ve had so far! If you have been reading this blog from the beginning or just started now, you can see that I love to entertain and cook comfort food, food from my childhood and newly discovered recipes (thank you Pinterest and other bloggers!). This is why I started the bucket list last year and have a new one this year.

I love to learn new techniques and recreate (or attempt to recreate) food from my past. My family is from South Africa, so I occasionally try traditional South African foods. My husband’s family is Swedish and we lived in the Scandinavian area of Seattle (Ya sure Ya Betcha Ballard!) for 8 years, so I try Scandinavian dishes from time to time. We live in Boston, so I try to add traditional New England dishes in. My family LOVES Asian food, so I also work that into our weekly repertoire. My husband lived in Mexico for a time, I have visited and certain Mexican inspired dishes are easy go to meals, so I cook them too. We are an international family, living in a world that is increasingly influenced by global trends and luckily foods! I don’t shop at specialty stores, because I don’t have the time. I shop at our local Hannafords (mostly) and Trader Joe’s, until the convenient farmer’s markets show up again 🙂 And yes, I do occasionally shop at Target when I’m there for other things because its convenient (for those in the Seattle area, I miss Fred Meyer!).

Here is where, if you don’t like meat, look away 🙂 I’ll write you a great post next week! There is a good polenta recipe below that is worth it though!

One of the first items on my bucket list for the year is making my own sausage. I can proudly say I did it!! I based mine on the recipe my Dad used to make boerwors, a South African farmer’s sausage. I used to enjoy making it with him. I did not enjoy the hand crank grinder and sausage maker, so my Kitchen Aid attachments made the work seem much lighter.

I went to Roxie’s in Quincy, MA (where my dad and I used to go) and got the natural casings and the meat. That place is no joke! I got there a couple minutes before it opened one Sunday morning and the line was already out the door! The meat prices are great and it is good quality, but wow! I would have thought a rock star was inside.

Ingredients
natural casings (hog casings work best)
ground beef (I ground my own chuck)
ground pork (I ground my own tenderloin)
lard (I couldn’t find lard, so used beef fat)
ground coriander
ground cloves
red wine vinegar
salt

I cut the meat up into 1 inch pieces and added all the spices and vinegar and then put it through the grinder.

I cooked a small patty of the sausage to check the flavor and it was good. Then I put the sausage maker attachment on the KitchenAid and put the casings on and started putting the meat through. It was much easier than I thought! Karina even helped.

I let it rest for 24 hours and we had a feast the next night! Next time I would use lard or pork fat which is softer and more of all the spices.

If you want more details on the amounts and process, feel free to email me, mammascooking@gmail.com.

The traditional boerwors sausage is grilled and served with “pap en sous” (corn porridge and a tomato and onion sauce). I made the rest of the meal easy and made polenta in the slow cooker (this is a good recipe, just add more salt and cheese as its a little bland) and served it some sauteed peppers, zucchini and onions, since I was out of tomatoes (canned or fresh).

Last night I baked the boerwors with sweet potato, potato and onion with a little red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, and coriander. It was a hit.

Next month I am going to tackle souffle’s I think. Might be fun for Valentine’s Day.

Thank you to those who read my blog and give me inspirations! Woo hoo 100th post!

Spring is in the air, cook fast and get out of the kitchen!

Spring is in the air and we have been spending as much time as possible outside trying to enjoy it! (Sorry to those in Seattle who are dealing with snow!) While we are enjoying the outdoors, I let my slow cooker do the cooking and use some go to items for quick meals that can be made at the last minute.

I have been trying to find a delicious easy way to make polenta from scratch. I’ve bought the premade tubes and mashed them up with milk and butter, bought the quick cooking polenta, which are both good, but not as good as using corn meal and mixing it by hand for a long time. Today I had an epiphany — make it in the slow cooker! So I did. I just googled slow cooker and polenta and found this recipe. It worked great and was delicious!! I served it with some sausages and leftover roasted butternut squash. I had promised Karina she could have carrots and cottage cheese too before I remembered about the leftover squash, so she got both! and ate both! Win win 🙂

I took a couple of ladles full of the hot polenta and put it in a small square tupperware dish in the fridge to cool for about 15 minutes while I grilled the sausage and microwaved the squash. when the polenta was cool, I cut a Mickey Mouse shape out with a cookie cutter.

The boys didn’t eat too much tonight, a little overtired from all the outdoor fun, but they usually like it 🙂

Last night I made perogies, peas and shrimp, which only took about 10 minutes! This was a hit with 4 out of 5 of us. Neil didn’t eat much other than the peas 🙂 I try to keep frozen perogies and peas in the freezer, along with something like shrimp that can easily be thawed. I cooked the shrimp in a little olive oil and then once they were pink on a sides, added 1 clove minced garlic and some leftover honey mustard lemon vinaigrette. [Honey mustard lemon vinaigrette – olive oil, lemon juice, white balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt, lemon pepper and sugar. I tossed a spinach salad with it over the weekend]

Coming up…cooking bucket lists and I’ve been doing some research on local CSAs and farmer’s markets!

Turkey time, a visit to a butcher shop and Italian Sausage Mac-n-cheese

Thanksgiving is a couple of weeks away and I love to cook for the holidays! I do not love spending more time in the kitchen than with my family (my kitchen right now is too small to have anyone but me and sometimes my 4 year old in it!), so I try to keep it simple. The one area that I do complicate the dinner a little bit is that after listening to many episodes of TheSplendid Table , I have heard chefs say over and over that they do not cook the turkey whole (except for one for show that is not eaten at the restaurant). So a couple of years ago I decided to breakdown and butcher a turkey myself. It was a satisfying experience that took me an hour and a half! Last year it took me only 45 minutes and a few cuts and scrapes on my hands J I put all the dark meat and giblets in a large pan and braise it for a couple of hours on the stove. The white meat is roasted in the oven. That way everything cooks evenly. I then use the braising liquid to make amazing gravy.

I do not want to butcher the turkey this year. I just don’t have the time or energy, so I’m trying to find a place where I can have someone do it for me. I started calling around the grocery stores and most of them responded something like, “Um, you want to do what? Why? I guess we could figure out how to do that for you.” Not a satisfactory answer. You can buy separate turkey breasts and wings and thighs in most grocery stores, but it doesn’t give you the giblets, which I have no desire to eat, but really do help make the dark meat and gravy taste better.

Yesterday I went into a butcher shop nearby and asked the woman behind the counter. She was very friendly (but did kind of seem confused as to why I would want that done) and went to the back to ask the butcher if that was something he could do. She came back and told me that the butcher’s father could probably do it. Their price per pound is also the same as the supermarket, so I will probably go through them, but I’m going to do a little more searching to see if I can find a butcher who sees eye to eye with me J I’m prepared that that may not happen this year, but then I have a whole other year to keep looking!

While I was in the butcher shop yesterday, I figured I should try out some of their meat. I knew I was planning on making mac-n-cheese last night and I saw their homemade sausages, so decided to get a long link of their sweet Italian sausage. It was delicious!

Mac-n-cheese with Sweet Italian sausage

Serves 6-8

1 box of pasta (I used whole wheat rotini)

1 stick of butter (sliced)

1 sweet Italian sausage

½ cup of flour

About 1 ½ to 2 cups of milk

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 Tbsp ground coriander

½ Tbsp lemon pepper

1 tsp salt (add more if you like. I’m notorious for under salting things)

4 oz of cream cheese

1 jar of puréed carrot babyfood (can use any pureed veggie you like, butternut squash would be good too)

8 oz of shredded cheddar (use 10 oz of cheese, whatever combo or single cheese you like)

2 oz of shredded mozzarella

Panko bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Make pasta according to package instructions. In a large sauce pan, throw in a couple pats of butter. Take the sausage out of its casing and cook in the butter. Remove the sausage when done and try to keep as much of the drippings in the pan. Put the heat on medium high and add the remainder of the butter and let it melt. Add the flour and whisk for 3 minutes or so to get rid of the flour taste. Then slowly add the milk until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Add mustard, coriander, pepper and salt and mix together. If sauce starts to get too thick, add a little more milk. Add cream cheese and puréed carrots. Whisk together. Taste sauce and adjust seasonings as you like. Take pan off the heat and add shredded cheese, mix together with a spoon and then add the cooked pasta and sausage (use a sauce pan that is large enough to accommodate all the pasta – one less dish to wash!). Mix together, flatten top and sprinkle lightly with panko bread crumbs. Put in the oven for 25 minutes or until edges start to brown.

I completely forgot to take a picture! Oh well. It was a big hit with the kids and my father in law. Tim and I got to go out on a date, so I’ll have some leftovers for lunch today!

Since I can’t lift anything over 5-10lbs right now, I had my father in law help me put the water on the stove to boil, put the pan in the oven and take it out. So thank you to him for his help. Also, thank you to Adriane for giving me the idea to make a “fancy” homemade hamburger helper type meal. Her version sounds really good and super easy too! “Macaroni, ground beef (browned while pasta cooked), a little milk, Tillamook cheddar, Beechers cheddar, and South African smoke added for the adult portions. Mmmmm.”

Send me any of your easy and go to fall meals! We all can take inspiration from each other to spice up our menus!