“Country-Style” carries multiple definitions and connotations. The author of 9-45: Country-Style Sausage Medley surmised that a dish containing this many varieties of vegetables must be “country-style”. Chicken sausage is a low calorie option, however, it lacks the punch of flavor a good beef sausage can provide.
This dish contains a lot of vegetables already. If I had to add any other vegetables, I might substitute the cabbage for Brussels sprouts.
The TIPS section gives some “sage” advice about using herbs in cooking. It is common to use herbs in cooking in our house.
I bought Chinese pea pods and snap peas at the same time and had a hard time telling them apart. Oh boy, more cabbage. (See my cabbage rolls recipe where I talk about how much I “love” cabbage.)
I stripped the string from the peas and set the pods aside. My mom used to make these when I was a kid, but Jamie doesn’t really like them.
Next, I chopped the green onions into thin slices.
My vegetable piles keep getting larger. Baby carrots come peeled already, so I just had to slice the carrots into medallions from there.
The white slices are the half of a small turnip that the recipe called for. I thought it was weird to call for such a small amount of turnip. I probably could have left it out and I wouldn’t have noticed that it was not there. It’s easy to recognize the chopped cabbage in this photo, the pile of it is huuuuuuge. While it looks like that’s a ton of cabbage, it cooks down to almost nothing. All the veggies go into the pot with the broth while I start cutting the sausage.
I wiped the board and chopped the chicken sausage into coarse medallions. I thought this size would be ideal so there would be some sausage in every bite instead the large chunks of sausage shown in the example photo. The vegetables are boiling until tender-crisp.
The vegetables smell great at this point and it is time to add the sausage. Let the mixture boil for another 5 minutes.
I removed the sausage and vegetables from the pot and seasoned everything with salt and pepper. Now it’s time to make the sauce.
I chose not to add butter and flour to thicken the sauce. Instead, I mixed cornstarch and water and stirred that into the broth and cabbage juice in the pan. The cornstarch thickened the sauce nicely and keeps the calorie count lower than using butter.
The recipe gives multiple choices of herbs to use and I chose parsley. The sauce reduced by about one third and I poured it back over the sausage medley.
Country-Style Sausage Medley on it’s own – 5/10, with rice 10/10. This dish needed some spice so I dressed it up with some Trader Joe’s Green Dragon Sauce. This dish was right up my alley, but Jamie wasn’t a big fan. The pea pods came out nice and crisp while the cabbage boiled down to little bits. The sausages were cooked through, but I would have liked to sear them first to get a little more flavor. Adding extra butter or oil would also add extra calories and this dish was intended to be light and healthy.
GRADE: B
