It’s nice to have a really hearty, hot dip as part of the spread when the ravenous football hordes are hungry. This is a jazzed up version of a classic sausage dip recipe, with warm, winter flavor.  Zesty Italian sausage with the bite of fennel is paired with woodsy sage and creamy, nutty fontina cheese, with a little kick of salty Parmesan to round it out.  Don’t skimp on the sage, as it really sets the tone for this dip.  Serve with hearty crackers, chips or toasted bread rounds, and maybe a knife for spreading should someone prefer to be dainty.

Italian Sausage Dip with Fontina and Sage

1 pound sweet Italian sausage, casings removed

2 cloves garlic

1 generous handful sage leaves, finely chopped

8 ounces cream cheese

4 ounces fontina cheese. grated

8 ounces sour cream

1 ounce parmesan cheese, grated

Break the sausage into small pieces and cook in large sauté pan over medium heat. Use a sturdy spatula or wooden spoon to break the meat up into very small pieces, almost crumbs.  Remember you will be eating this as a dip or spread and big chunks are too hard to eat.  Cook until the sausage is no longer pink.  Put the garlic cloves through a garlic press (or very finely mince them) into the pan, stir and cook for another minute.  Sprinkle half the chopped sage over the sausage and stir until wilted. Drain any excess fat from the pan.  Cut the cream cheese into small cubes and add to the sausage, stirring until it melts.  Add the fontina and stir until the cheese begins to melt and become creamy.  Stir in the sour cream and the remaining sage and cook over medium heat until everything is melted, smooth and bubbly.  Sprinkle over the parmesan cheese and stir.

Transfer the dip to an oven safe baker and serve immediately, or the dip can be cooled and refrigerated overnight at this point.  When ready to serve, heat the dip in a 350° oven until hot through and bubbly, stirring a few times. Serve with crackers, bread rounds or corn chips.

Serves 8 -1 0, can be doubled

I am not an overly suspicious person.  Sure, I have my little quirks, but I don’t worry about black cats, walking under ladders, throwing spilled salt over my left shoulder.   But there are a few traditions that I adhere to because, well, it can’t hurt.  Particularly if that tradition involves delicious food.  So on New Year’s Day, I always eat black-eyed peas and greens. For luck and prosperity.  Sometimes I eat them separately, but this gumbo includes all the ingredients for a good year.  The traditional ingredients of good-luck hoppin’ john (rice and black-eyed peas), which is another New Year tradition in the South, plus greens for prosperity.  Here’s a little more information on Southern luck traditions.

This gumbo can be made the day before and reheated, which is a boon if you have been out all night celebrating. Just reheat, cook some rice and add the collards. I highly recommend using smoked ham hock stock.  It really gives the gumbo a smoky, earthy, rich flavor. Making it in the slow cooker is a breeze, and you can do it ahead of time.  If you can’t manage, look for ham stock at some grocery stores, or use the combo of chicken and beef.

Good Luck Gumbo

1 pound smoked sausage, such as kielbasa

2 Tablespoon olive or vegetable oil

1 onion

1 green pepper

4 stalks celery

1 Tablespoon flour

1 teaspoon creole seasoning (I use Tony Chachere’s)

6 cups ham hock stock*, or 4 cups chicken stock and 2 cups beef stock

1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes

1 pound black-eyed peas, fresh or frozen and thawed

1 ½ cups long grain white rice

3 ½ cups water

Collard leaves

Cut the smoked sausage into bite-size cubes.  Heat the oil in a 5 quart Dutch oven, add the sausage and cook over medium high heat until the sausage begins to brown. Finely chop the onion, seeded bell pepper and celery.  I do this in a small food processor, one vegetable at a time, pulsing to chop the vegetable finely.  Add the “trinity” vegetables to the pot and stir.  Cover the pot and cook for five minutes to soften the vegetables, then remove the cover, stir well and cook until everything is nice and soft and any liquid has evaporated.   Stir in the flour and cook a further minute, then stir in the creole seasoning.  Pour in the stock and the canned tomatoes with their juice.  Bring to a boil and cook for 10 minutes uncovered, reduce to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes. Add the black-eyed peas and continue cooking for another half an hour.  The gumbo should reduce and thicken slightly.  The gumbo can be made up to this point, cooled and refrigerated, covered, overnight.

When ready to serve, cook the rice. Stir the rice into the water in a large saucepan with a tight-fitting lid. Bring to a boil and boil until almost all the water is absorbed and little air bubbles form in the rice, about 10 – 12 minutes, stirring a few times to prevent sticking. Remove from the heat and tightly cover the pan.

Cut the collard leaves in half and cut out the stems.  Stack the leaf halves, three at a time, on top of each other and roll up like a cigar.  Cut the leaves into thin ribbons.  You can further chop the collard ribbons if you’d like.

Heat the gumbo to a low boil over medium high heat.  It will thicken as it sits, but loosen up when heated.  But add a little water if you need to get things moving.  Add the collards, stir, and cover the pot.  Cook until the collards are tender and wilted, about 5 minutes.  Serve over cooked rice.  If you have saved some ham hock meat from making the stock, dice that and stir it into the gumbo as well.  And if you’d like, sprinkle some hot sauce over the gumbo.

*Smoked Ham Hock Stock

Hock Stock is an amazing cooking medium for field peas, beans and greens, as well as a great base for soup or gumbo.  I always look for a naturally smoked hock (not one that has no artificial smoke flavoring added).  I get these from farmers market vendors when I can, and make a batch of stock to freeze.  I can then have to the long, slow cooked taste in quick versions of my favorite southern dishes.

1 large smoked ham hock, cut into three pieces

1 onion

2 carrots

2 celery stalks

1 Tablespoon black pepper corns

3 bay leaves

Place all the ingredients in the crock of a large slow cooker.  Add 10 – 12 cups of water to fill the crock.  Cook on the low setting for 10 – 12 hours.  Strain the solids from the stock and refrigerate for several hours.  When the stock is cold, skim any solidified fat from the top and discard.  Strain the stock through cheesecloth to remove any last bits of debris.

If you’d like, pull the meat from the ham hock pieces and dice. It is a great addition to any soup or beans you are cooking with the stock.

The stock will keep in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week or can be frozen for up to a year.  The same goes for the hock meat, in a separate container from the stock.

Makes 6 – 8 cups

I spend the vast majority of my time creating recipes.  Thinking about ideas, how to make them work, what I want to cook, what I want to eat, how to share the idea. And people often ask me about my process.  Sometimes ideas pop into my head fully formed, but more often, like this recipe, it’s by trial, error and a certain determination that there is a good idea somewhere in there. So here it goes.

Ionce saw a recipe for a “sausage cake” in a very old community cookbook, where the recipes where still in the handwriting of the contributors, and the idea of a savory breakfast cake intrigued me.  That recipe, however, was horrible – dry and tasteless and tough.  But the idea of a savory coffee cake, if you will, stuck with me.  First, I thought sausage folded into a plain muffin batter in a cake form, but that idea fell flat.  Boring.  Adding an onion the next time around helped, but it was the cake that was the real problem.  I fiddled with a lot of ideas to boost the flavor, from cornmeal to yogurt or sour cream, but those never hit the mark.  When I had practically given up on the idea, mayonnaise hit me as a way to add tenderness and a little tang, like the chocolate cake made with mayonnaise that has an indefinable quality that sets it apart.  So batter fixed.  Cheese was the next obvious addition, and I started with cheddar.  Good, but not interesting.  I also needed to add a layer of complimentary flavor, and herbs were the obvious choice.  I resisted sage at first, because sausage and sage are such a ubiquitous combination.  But my forays into other herbs just weren’t right.  I finally admitted that there is a reason sausage and sage are used together so often – they work.  That led me back to the cheese.  With the woody note of sage, cheddar was suddenly more interesting and complimentary.  Done.

In this case, the process has been ongoing for several years, not a constant trial.  It probably took ten trys before I hit the right recipe, and then made that several times to be sure. This idea of a savory breakfast cake just stuck with me, and I would return to it time and time again, making notes on my original notebook page.  That’s where I start.  I have a spiral notebook that I write recipes in, erasing, making notes, jotting ideas, instructions for changes next time.  I also have a dedicated group of recipe testers – family and friends – as I get close to where I want to be, they sample and make suggestions (or just tell me it’s no good).  When I hit the point where I like the result, and they like the result.  I know I’m there.

Savory Sausage Breakfast Cake

This is best served shortly after baking, though it’s fine at room temperature.  If you want quick prep for breakfast, cook the sausage and onions and toss with the sage and cheese the night before, cover and refrigerate.  Add the egg, make the batter and bake in the morning.

1 pound ground sausage

½ cup chopped onion

1 cup finely grated cheddar cheese

1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage leaves

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup milk

¼ cup mayonnaise

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Grease an 8 by 8 inch baking dish.

Break the sausage into pieces and place in a skillet.  Cook the sausage until it is beginning to brown and has rendered some of its fat, breaking it into small pieces as you cook.   Add the onion and continue to cook until the sausage is browned and no longer pink in the middle and the onions are soft.  Drain well and leave to cool slightly.

Place the cooled sausage and onion into a bowl and add the cheddar cheese and sage.  Toss to combine.  Add the lightly beaten egg and stir to mix everything together well.

In another bowl, stir the flour, baking powder and baking soda together with a fork.  Add the milk and mayonnaise and stir with the fork to combine.  Pour 1/2 of the batter into the prepared pan and spread to cover the bottom.  Spread the sausage and cheese mixture evenly over the batter in the pan, then spread the remaining batter over the top.  Do the best you can, but it will not cover the top of the sausage mixture and that’s fine.

Bake the cake for 20 – 25 minutes until firm and golden.  Serve warm.

Serves 8- 9

So, now you have, I am sure, studied the primer for making good Buttermilk Biscuits.  And you’d like to know all the many ways you can serve your beautiful creations. Here are two of my favorites.  I once had some friends by for a biscuit bar, serving baskets full of homemade biscuits, homemade preserves, tomato gravy, sausage gravy and lots of good butter.  I even made chocolate gravy, but I am saving that for another time.

Tomato Gravy for Biscuits

½ pound bacon

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 (14 ½ ounce) can finely diced tomatoes

3 cups tomato juice

Ground black pepper

Cut the bacon into small pieces and fry in a large skillet until crispy.  Remove the bacon to a paper-towel lined plate, then drain off all put 2 Tablespoons of bacon grease.  Fry the onion in the drippings until soft, then add the canned tomatoes and the tomato juice, scraping up any browned bacon bits from the bottom of the pan.   Season with some good grinds of black pepper.

Bring the gravy to a boil over medium high heat, then reduce the heat and simmer until the gravy thickens and reduces, about 15 – 20 minutes.  Stir in the reserved bacon. You can save some of the bacon pieces to sprinkle over the gravy if you like.  Spoon over hot, split biscuits.

Sausage Gravy for Biscuits

I like my gravy really peppery, so I go to town with the grinder.  Depending on the sausage, you may need very little or no salt.

½ pound breakfast sausage

¼ cup flour

2 ½ cups milk

Salt and ground black pepper

Crumble the sausage into a large skillet and cook until no longer pink in the middle and nice and browned.  Break the sausage into small chunks as you cook it.  Remove the sausage to a paper towel lined plate with a slotted spoon, leaving the dripping behind.  There should be about 2 Tablespoons of dripping left in the pan.  If not, add a little oil to make that amount and heat up. Sprinkle over the flour and cook, stirring and scraping, for about 2 minutes until the flour is lightly browned.  Slowly whisk in the milk, continuing to scrape the bottom of the pan.  Cook, whisking frequently, until the gravy is thick.  Stir the sausage back in and heat through, seasoning with salt and black pepper to taste. Serve over hot, split biscuits.