If you don’t already own one of these Le Creuset braisers, do yourself and your offspring a favour and put it on your Christmas list! It’s a lifetime investment and gets used almost daily in my kitchen. It’s the perfect size for this recipe. You can adapt this recipe to suit any flavour of Lepp’s fresh sausages. Love the Italian sausages? Omit the Mexican spice and replace it with your favourite Italian blend. Replace the black beans, corn and green chilis with a tin of cannellini beans or artichoke hearts.
1 Tbsp. Triple Smoke Texx-Mexx spice blend (if you don’t have that in your cupboard, get one at the market! Or substitute a taco/Mexican seasoning of your choice)
1 tsp. cumin
¼ cup white wine, chicken stock, or water
1 398 ml. diced tomatoes, I love Italissima’s fire-roasted tomatoes
1 118 ml. diced green chilis
1 540 ml. black beans, drained and rinsed OR
2 cups corn kernels (you have Lepp’s corn in your freezer, right?)
OR a mix of both equaling about 2-3 cups
4 oz. cream cheese, room temperature, cut into cubes
1 tsp. salt, or to taste
400 gm. dried pasta (Frustratingly, I realize a bag of pasta is usually 500 gms., but I just found that too much pasta for the sauce)
Optional toppings:
Grated Cheddar Cheese
Cilantro leaves
Diced Avocado
Sour Cream
Chopped Green Onion
Diced fresh or pickled jalapenos
Instructions
See note on how to poach fresh sausages. After cooking, slice sausages into ½ rounds.
Heat a large pan over medium heat, add about 1 Tbsp. of cooking oil. If desired, sauté sausage rounds just to get a golden brown colour. Remove sausages from the pan and set them aside.
Place onion and pepper in the frying pan, sauté for approximately 5 minutes, or until softened.
Add Texx-Mexx spice blend and cumin and stir for a minute to allow the spices to release their natural oils.
Add wine, stock or water and simmer, using a wooden spoon to scrape up all the browned bits.
Add tomatoes, green chilis, black beans and/or corn. Stir to combine and bring up to a simmer.
Add cream cheese and stir gently to melt the cheese into the sauce.
Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more salt if necessary.
Add the sliced sausage rounds, and keep the sauce at a gentle simmer until ready to serve.
Meanwhile, boil the pasta according to package directions. Drain and add to the pasta sauce. If your pan is not large enough to hold everything, transfer it to a large bowl and mix.
If you don’t already own one of these Le Creuset braisers, do yourself and your offspring a favour and put it on your Christmas list! It’s a lifetime investment and gets used almost daily in my kitchen. It’s the perfect size for this recipe. You can adapt this recipe to suit any flavour of Lepp’s fresh sausages. Love the Italian sausages? Omit the Mexican spice and replace it with your favourite Italian blend. Replace the black beans, corn and green chilis with a tin of cannellini beans or artichoke hearts.
After what already seems like a lifetime of learning about cooking, reading about cooking and actual cooking, I love that there’s still always more to learn! Recently I started following Dorie Greenspan’s blog. She’s a seasoned chef, author and New York Times food writer. As she’s recently released her 14th book, Baking with Dori, her latest blog articlesgive us an insider’s look at writing and photographing a cookbook. The laborious process involves testing, retesting, committing the recipes to paper, and testing some more. Once she’s satisfied with the written recipe, the food photography begins. This takes FOUR PEOPLE to cook, style, photograph and hold the light just so for each photo.
I’m going to let you in on a secret. That’s NOT at all how we do things around here. Usually, I hear from one of our department managers that they have a new ingredient or product that needs some promotion. Then I get to work finding recipes to highlight the special ingredient. The dish is tweaked and tested on Farmer Rob, and when he declares it good, I’m ready for the next step. I cook it again in my home kitchen, and one of our marketing team comes to my house to photograph it for the newsletter and website. We take advantage of the excellent natural lighting in my dining room and use my dishes and linens. Happily, this gives me a never-ending excuse to purchase more dishes and pretty linens! Thank you Yes, Chef, and please don’t tell Rob! Once we finish taking the photos, Farmer Rob and I enjoy the leftovers for dinner again. That’s it, nothing fancy. The opposite of what happens for a professional cookbook. Simply put, I promote products we eat in our home, and I try to present easy ways for you to recreate them—no recipes with 15 steps and requiring ten pots. No one’s got time for that.
I hope you enjoy this week’s hearty pasta dish featuring our sausage of the month. You can’t go wrong with Mexican flavours when the sausage ingredients are bacon, cheddar and jalapenos. I’ve also included the best method I’ve found for cooking fresh sausages indoors.
After twelve years at the market, I’m slowly transitioning into a part-time role and focusing on doing only what I love. Lucky me! Nothing gives me greater joy than hearing how much you enjoy our recipes and which ones are the favourites. I genuinely love showing you how easy and satisfying it is to share simple, delicious home-cooked food with your favourite people.
