Sausage and Potato Supper

Submitted by Lawen

This is one of my girlfriend's favorite fall recipes and she requests it all the time. It's a great dinner for several reasons: 1) Perfect for hectic weeknights; the whole thing takes less than 30 minutes to prepare and it's all done in one pan for super-fast cleanup. 2) Hearty comfort food that warms you up on a cold night. 3) It involves copious quantities of beer.

Sausage and Warm Potato Salad Supper

Ingredients:

• 1 LB cooked sausage (Kielbasa and Hot Smoked Sauasge both work great)
• 4 slices bacon, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 med. white or red onion, chopped medium-fine
• 2 1/2 C (1 package) diced potatoes with onion
• Dijon Mustard
• Cider Vinegar
• Beer (pretty much anything you enjoy drinking should be fine but very dark beers can be a bit too bitter)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 200F. If you have 2 huge sausages, cut them in half; you want four ~1/2 LB sausages. Using a bamboo skewer or toothpick, pierce the sausages all over. Don't go all the way through if you can help it, but don't bother being too meticulous either, you just need to create a path for the beer to get into the sausage and some of the pork fat to get out.

Toss the sausages in a big ass fry pan or skillet over medium heat, nonstick comes in handy if you have it. Add enough beer to come about 1/3 of an inch up the side of the pan.

Bring beer to a rapid simmer.

Cover the pan, leaving a small gap for steam to escape through. Steam your sausages in beer (!! that may be the best sentence ever written) until they plump up and look juicy and delicious, 5 minutes or so.

Remove the lid and continue simmering, letting the water in the beer cook off as steam. Turn sausages as necessary. Check out the pork fat floating on top of the beer, damn that looks good.

As the liquid cooks off continue to turn the sausage. At this point you're searing the sausage while simultaneously coating it in caramelized beer glaze. It's ok if the beer starts to get really brown but if it starts to burn outright, turn your heat down and splash a couple gulps of beer into the pan to simultaneously deglaze and bring the temperature of the pan down quickly.

When your sausages have browned up from a combination of heat and beer glaze, remove them to a foil-lined pan or baking sheet (it's MUCH easier to throw away a piece of foil than to scrub your baking sheet later). Stick the pan in the 200 degree oven to keep the sausage warm.

Now hustle back to your pan and dump about half cup of beer in there. Use a plastic or wooden spoon to scrape the bottom of the pan, releasing all the flavor-packed brown bits into the beer.

Add your chopped bacon to the pan and fry intil it begins to crisp up. Toss in your chopped onion and fry in the bacon fat until it begins to soften and turn translucent. Toss in your minced garlic and saute for just a minute until it smells really good.

Dump half a bottle of beer in there, giving the bottom another good scrape to make sure nothing's stuck.

Now add your bag of diced potatoes and stir everything up really well, you want to coat the potatoes as much as possible.

Cover your pan again and steam the potatoes in beer until they soften. You'll need to check them often, both to stir them around so they don't stick to the pan and to make sure that there's still enough beer in the pan to steam the potatoes. If your beer cooks off, poor in some more and recover. Keep doing this until the potatoes are as soft as you'd like them to be. When they're suitably soft, remove the lid and let any excess beer cook off. Toss the potatoes around in the pan to fry up the outsides a bit.

Add about 2 teaspoons of cider vinegar (more or less to taste) and about a tablespoon of Dijon mustard (I used 2 teaspoons of smooth dijon and 2 teaspoons of whole stone ground Dijon). Grind in some fresh black pepper and salt to taste. Any other seasonings you want to try should go in now too (chopped fresh parsley is great in it).

Serving

Finally, pull your sausage out of the oven and set on top of the potatoes. You could either serve it family style in the pan or slice the sausage and serve it over the potatoes. Crack open another beer to wash it down. I often serve it with crusty bread, slices of muenster cheese, and pickles.