Smoked Sausage and Potatoes

Tonight Kevin (yes, that’s right, my husband does 95% of the cooking and cleaning around here, thank heavens) made a recipe that I so lovingly printed out and left on the counter for him. Lucky him, I also purchased all of the ingredients so as to make his job easy.

Turns out, it was easy anyway.

Thanks to Pinterest, I’ve Kevin has tried many, many new recipes. Some of them have been huge fails, but some have been keepers (or as we call them in our house, re-dos). This one, my friends, is a keeper! Easy, inexpensive, and tasty – notice I did not say healthy, but I guess it could be worse, right? I’m of the school of thought that anything you make at home has GOT to be better for you than something at a restaurant. Basically, this is not something you would want to make every day for dinner – and you’d probably get sick of it anyway. Every once in a while, though? This stuff is legit. (Yes, I’m 36 and I just said “legit”).

Here’s my crappy picture (hey, it’s not easy to make this look good. You just have to trust me on this one):

 

Smoked Sausage and Potatoes (via Recipes from the Big Blue Binder)

1 pkg. of Smoked Sausage (we only use Beef in this house, but it’s just whatever – I used Hillshire Farms if that makes a difference)

1 large onion, peeled and chopped (Kevin chopped them up tiny, I prefer them to be bigger chunks)

5 large potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1/2 inch cubes (we used 10 smaller ones instead)

Olive oil (yeah, I was out, so he used Canola. It was fine.)

Fine sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Sweet Paprika (I’m pretty sure I only have one kind of paprika, and it may not be sweet!)

Dried thyme

Grated cheddar cheese (we only had Cheddar/Jack blend and it was great)

Preheat oven to 400. Line a large baking pan with shallow sides (we used a 9×13, which may require some timing adjustments*) with foil and drizzle with some oil. Set aside.

Cut the sausage into rounds, or if you’re fancy, you can slice them all sideways style (what is that called, anyway? Diagonally? Well, whatever, Kevin sliced them fancy.) Put sausage, onions, and potatoes in a large bowl. Drizzle some more oil on them and season with salt, pepper, paprika, and dried thyme. Toss it together with your hands until everything is coated. Pour the mixture out into the baking pan and spread it out.

Roast for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so, until potatoes are golden brown. Turn off the oven and sprinkle the cheese over the top (just a handful – you don’t need to cover it). Stick it back in the oven for a couple of minutes to make the cheese melty.

Serve immediately! We had sourdough bread (CARBS CARBS CARBS) with it. We probably should have had something green with it too, but I’m lazy and we didn’t.

* It took us about an hour to cook – and it could have gone a few minutes longer but the sausage was going to burn. I think this happened because we used a 9×13 pan with deeper sides… potatoes took longer to cook!)