Sausage Apple and Cranberry Stuffing

I love finding recipes with beautiful photos and descriptions that make you salivate before you can finish the instructions.  This recipe is the perfect stuffing for Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Unfortunately, I have no gorgeous photos to make you salivate.  I scrounged up a few just to make it interesting.  Seriously, this stuffing is the bomb.

Ingredients:

3 3/4 cups of cubed white bread

1 1/2 cups of cubed whole wheat bread

1 lb ground sausage

1 cup finely chopped onion

1 Golden Delicious apple, cored and chopped

1 cooked turkey liver, finely chopped

3/4 cup chopped celery

3/4 cup dried cranberries

1/3 cup minced fresh parsley

4 Tbl. melted butter

3/4 c. turkey stock

2 1/2 tsp. sage

1 1/2 tsp. rosemary

1/2 tsp thyme

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Bake bread cubes on baking sheet 5-7 minutes.  (I often buy pre-made bread cubes/stuffing)

In large skillet, cook sausage and onions.  

Add celery, sage, rosemary and thyme and cook 2 minutes.

Pour sausage mixture over bread in bowl.  

Mix in apples, cranberries, parsley and liver.

Drizzle with turkey stock and melted butter and mix lightly.

Stuff in turkey or cook in pan until internal temperature is 160 degrees.

Rich Folks Pasta

After more than a month of radio silence, I'm back with a great recipe I collected a while back but never had the courage to try.  It was much easier than I expected, and wow - the payoff was awesome.  This is a great pasta recipe for a dinner party, pot luck or just the family with lots of yummy leftovers.

The original title of the recipe as I received it from an old friend was "Sausage Pasta With Tomatoes & Spinach."  Hmm - boring.  I named it more for how it tastes - rich.

Ingredients:
1 lb sweet Italian sausage (casing removed).  You can get your grocery store meat counter to do this, or you can snip the end and slice the side of a sausage and squeeze it out.
1 medium onion
3 large garlic cloves
1 28 oz can iced whole tomatoes
1/4 prepared pesto sauce
10 oz rigatoni or penne
1 c. Romano cheese
8 c. spinach leaves (2/3 of 10 oz package)
6 oz mozzarella cheese - chopped
6 oz mozzarella cheese - shred
1 pint heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Cook pasta to "al dente" (not too long or it will be mushy after baking).
In a large saucepan, brown onion, sausage and garlic about 10 minutes.  Add tomatoes with juices.  Simmer until thicker - about 10 minutes.  Stir in pesto and cream and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Oil a 9 x 13" baking dish.  Mixed cooked pasta, raw spinach, chopped mozzarella and 1/3 cup Romano cheese.  Stir in the hot sauce.  Mix and transfer to baking dish.  Sprinkle remaining Romano cheese and shredded mozzarella.  It should look like this:

Cover and bake for 30 minutes.  You will need to let this cool before you can serve it.  You also may want to serve small portions - it is rich.  You'll notice that the combination of the tomatoes, heavy cream and pesto taste a bit like a vodka sauce, but you will be happy you didn't take shortcuts.

Garnish with parsley and enjoy!

cindy