You say SAUsage I say SOYsage...

I made dinner! A "real food" dinner!
   Normally I leave that up to The Chef.
Dinner takes alot of planning. It requires many different pans and cooking times, temps, seasonings and other.... stuff.
  And honestly I just prefer to bake.
But I thought I would give the guy a break for once and take the opportunity to let him step away from the kitchen but to also bring you a new Apron Strings recipe!

  So with that said... lets talk sausage!

Smoked Sausage and Rice to be exact.

   Now to be honest, I'm not a big smoked sausage fan. We had it at times when I was kid, but there is something about the idea of what is IN store packaged summer sausage that gets to me... {add in the fact that I am a newly converted veg head and you have a bit of trouble} BUT that is the magic of marrying my chef... he makes all our sausagie products by hand with REAL bits of meat! So I no longer worry about the icky stuff that "they" put in the food that I'm serving to my family!
 {here is where I would normally get on my farm to table, food tracking soap box but I will spare you... today at least, we will chat about this soon tho!}

  So when I was searching for today's recipe and sausage was involved I thought "hey, what the heck!"
Now I made 2 versions of this... one with yummy meat for the familia, and one {very small batch} with soysage for me. It wasn't half bad! I also tweaked a few other things... but I will let you know along the way!

{serves 6}

Ingredients:

4 cups cooked rice *I used brown rice
12oz of country style linked sausage {or soysage if you want a meatless version}
1 large onion diced
1 green bell pepper diced
1 cup diced celery
1 can tomatoes quartered {I used real tomatoes about 3 romas and I diced them}
1 cup of beef broth {on the familias version of this I added the broth, on mine I just used some juice from the tomatoes and a little h2o... just as good!}
1 can sliced pineapple in unsweetened juice {I just grabbed a whole pineapple, cut into pieces, about 2 cups worth and juiced the rest, using a cup and a half of the juice for the latter part of the recipe}
1/4Tsp both garlic and pepper
1 Tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbsp cornstarch


Directions:
While the rice is cooking cover and cook the sausage in 1/2cup of water for about 5 minutes {if you are using homemade sausage and not the precooked store bought kind you will need to cook longer more like 30 minutes}
Remove sausages from the water and thinly slice.
Combine sausage, onion, bell pepper, and celery in large skillet, cook till veggies are tender crisp.
Add tomatoes, broth {or tomato juice for meatless}, pineapple chunks (drain and reserve juice if your using canned) add brown sugar and seasonings. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes.
Blend cornstarch and pineapple juice pour over meat and veggie mixture and stir till clear and thick about 2 minutes. Serve over beds of fluffy rice.

 recipe submitted by June Brannon to the 1974 Sunnylane UMW cookbook

This was actually really good, and easy! A little sweet, a little sour and everyones bellies were full!

Do you have a recipe you want to see featured in Apron Strings? Just email it {along with why it is so special to you} to tawny76@cox.net

Be good to each other!