Pigs and Potatoes

With LA back in my guest room, I now have a captive audience/guinea pig for some experimental recipes. I have a number of them in mind, but I decided to start slow. I'd found a wonderful-sounding recipe in the classic cookbook Favorite Recipes from Southern Kitchens: Meats.  What's not to love about a book called Meats?

The recipe? Pigs and Potatoes. This recipe has everything that I look for: catchy title, short ingredient list, easy instructions, and the promise of an unusual dining experience. The ingredients called for are simply baking potatoes and sausages. The instructions were easier said than done: bore a hole in each potato with an apple corer and jam a sausage link into the hole. Bake until done.

Sounds easy enough. We picked our potatoes, ensuring maximum girth for the hole-boring. Next came the sausages. Spinach and garlic chicken sausages sounded tasty.

Breakfast sausages would be about the same diameter as the holes created by the apple corer. The chicken sausages were not. With a lot of elbow grease and laughter (and a little squirting from the sausages, I finally got the sausages into the potatoes and into the oven (at 425 degrees F for 45 minutes).

The smell that filled the house had us eagerly awaiting the ring of the timer. The potatoes were finally done and we dug in. The sausages were very good. Redolent of garlic, light-tasting, and not at all greasy. Surprisingly, though, the flavor of the sausage didn't permeate the potato. Not even a little. LA liked the sausage, but added, "This is the driest potato I have ever eaten." I rationalized it by saying that a normal baked potato would have butter and sour cream to help out with the dryness. LA wasn't buying it.

Beigest meal ever.

I haven't given up on Pigs and Potatoes. We'll be having it regularly until I can make it edible. Next time will be with Mexican chorizo. I say a greasy sausage will make for a better potato. LA prefers the word "moist". Either way, I see a lot of Pigs and Potatoes in our future.