Sheetpan Sausages with Caramelized Shallots and Apples

Recipe Hits and Misses

Recipe Hits: This recipe tastes decadent but it’s not actually so bad for you. You could make this with chicken sausage and add them mid way, or just have a decadent “sausage night” where you just live up your love of sausage. You could use vegan sausage and add them later in the recipe.

Recipe Misses: An earlier visitor to this recipe who reviewed the recipe put the sausages in with the vegetables and to turn them mid way, when you add the mustard. I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED! The sausages were cooked but I like them crispy. Next time I will add them at the beginning.

Sausage, how I love ya , how I love ya!!!

It’s sausage. It’s apples. It’s carmelized onions! Need I say more? Perhaps not, but I will. This dish is kind of like Oktoberfest, but well, whenever you want. You could use brats- I used Italian sweet sausage and well, it was…sweet! I say sweet as in awesome, not sweet as in the tooth fairy gets excited…This recipe feels like harvest abundance and once you have cut everything and set it on the pan, it’s pretty simple.

I did not have whole grain mustard so I used deli brown mustard instead, and it was still pretty awesome. As a lover of condiments, contractions in your budget make food not as fun. I open my cabinet of mustards and being greeted by generic brands from big box stores makes my heart shed a tear. However, this recipe does not suffer from not having premium sausage or high end fixins. The sweetness of the apples feels decadent, the onions are perfectly treated and the sausage just makes you feel like you’re living well, even if was on sale.

Ingredients

5-6 Shallots or a medium onion diced and peeled

2 crisp apples (preferably one tart, like Granny Smith, and one sweet, like Fuji)

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more as needed

Kosher salt and black pepper

1 pound sweet or hot Italian sausages

3 fresh rosemary sprigs

1 teaspoon whole-grain mustard

1 to 2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar, to taste

Chopped fresh parsley, for serving (optional) * I omitted

Sweet potato (medium) *I added

Preheat the oven to 390 degrees. Cut your apples, onions, and sweet potato, toss with oliv eoil and season with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. .

Put in the oven and toss with mustard and rosemary. Places the sausages, pricked with your fork, nestled in the pan.. Cook for 22-25 minutes.

Pour the apple cider vinegar over the vegetables and serve hot!

My Meditation on Food and Abundance

As I said before, this dish tastes like harvest abundance and I offer these thoughts on what I am thinking about abundance. We have been through an ordeal with this pandemic and for Americans who are not used to scarcity, it has been scary. It has certainly been scary for me. Remembering in April how soon I thought this would be over is bittersweet because I remember being alarmed, but not extraordinarily so, at going to a store which had run out of onions. In nations all over the world there are scarcities and shortages with such regularity it is commonplace. My friend was talking about her father-in-law and in his stockpile of food you can read the history in his experiences during childhood. Abundance, in the way it exists in a typical American grocery store, is its own relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity. Perhaps today we have more of an appreciation for what we have and how to much is given. much should be expected.