Shed Kitchen: Apple, Sausage, and Sweet Potato Casserole

If you are craving sweet, creamy comfort food, this is the best recipe I’ve made in a long time! It was a great dinner for a rainy day like Wednesday. It fit my basic criteria for a perfect dinner: simple, healthy, colorful, delicious. (Sweet potatoes and apples are two of my favorite foods ever, so maybe I am biased.) I adapted this from a recipe I found on The Happy Housewife Recipe Blog.

Ingredients (serves two)

Two sweet potatoes

Two small apples, chopped

One white onion, chopped

1 tbsp whole wheat flour

2 cups low sodium chicken broth

3 chicken sausage links (I used Trader Joes roasted garlic chicken sausage, which is the best flavor I’ve had thus far–I can’t promise the recipe will be as good with a substitute)

Herbs (I used pinches of cinnamon, fresh rosemary, and dried sage)

Method

Wash the sweet potatoes and cut them in wedges. Microwave for six minutes. While it’s heating, chop the apples in bite sized pieces and cut the sausages into medallions.

Cover a large, nonstick pan with a thin layer of broth and heat. Add the onions and chicken sausages and brown for about five minutes. Add the apples and sweet potatoes another 1/2 cup of broth.

Cover and let cook for another five minutes. Remove cover and mix in flour, coating the mixture. Slowly add more broth and toss. This will cause a sauce to begin to form. Cover and cook for another five minutes. Add the herbs and the rest of the broth, toss, and allow to simmer, covered, for another three to five minutes.

During the last five minutes, I made whole wheat couscous and sauteed some spinach in the microwave. But this dish is honestly enough on its own. It is one of my favorite things I’ve ever cooked. Of course, I love apples and sweet potatoes, but cooked in the broth, with the delicious garlic chicken sausage, onion, and herbs, it was a million times better. Everything was incredibly sweet and creamy and warm, and the touches of cinnamon made it feel like Thanksgiving in June. It’s also so easy to adapt this recipe to serve more or less people (this will definitely be a Dinner for One in the future, but I know boys and girls alike will enjoy it if you’ve got company).

Apples and potatoes provide a lot of volume for not a lot of calories, so even though it looked like a lot (my mom: “I can eat all that?”), it was still less calories than a Lean Cuisine.