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Dinner Tonight: Sausage, Potato, and Mushroom Roast

Posted by Blake Royer, October 20, 2009 at 5:00 PM

[Photograph: Blake Royer]

A friend of mine recently gave me a bag of homegrown fingerling potatoes from her father's garden in Iowa, where he grows vegetables for his restaurant and always donates extras to his children. With more than enough to go around, I was the lucky recipient of my own stash. I immediately wanted to roast them and preserve their lovely small size. While any big potato can be cut into strips or mashed, the fingerling would be wasted on these methods. As a waxy potato, it forms a crisp brown crust when roasted while the interior goes creamy.

To make it a full meal, I bought a couple sausages (one per person is about right) and used half a box of mushrooms with the idea of cobbling together a roast. The potatoes went in first because they take the longest, then I pulled out the roasting tray, scattered the mushrooms about, and nestled the sausages in snugly. The sausages leaked their wonderful fat into the tray, which helped crisp the potatoes. The mushrooms sucked up the rest. The result was the hearty stuff of fall days, with barely more effort than turning on the oven and tossing everything in.

Sausage, Potato, and Mushroom Roast

- serves 4 -

Ingredients

2 pounds fingerling potatoes or other small waxy potato cut into chunks
4 raw sausages of various types (such as andouille, lamb, pork, etc)
1 box white mushrooms, stems removed and halved
Olive oil as needed
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Wash and scrub the potatoes and cut into bite-size chunks. Transfer to a roasting pan or dish that holds all the ingredients snugly. Douse the potatoes quite generously with olive oil and toss with salt and pepper. Roast, undisturbed, for about 20 minutes.

2. Remove the pan from the oven and stir up the potatoes gently. Distribute the mushrooms into the pan and toss them to coat with the oil, then nestle the sausages near the center. Drizzle the sausages with a bit of oil and return to the oven for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the sausages and potato chunks. Turn the sausages once during cooking.

3. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cut the sausages in half or quarters, and sprinkle everything with the parsley. Serve alone or perhaps with a little mustard.

About the author: Blake Royer founded The Paupered Chef with Nick Kindelsperger, where he writes about food and occasional travels. After spending a year in Estonia, he now lives in Chicago.

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Tags: fingerling potatoes, mushrooms, potatoes, roasts, sausage

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