Recipe from Afar: Cruel Temptation from My Father

Perhaps forgetting that I'm currently making my way through the "elimination phase" of the elimination diet, perhaps not, my father sent me this recipe:

Savory Sausage Roast

• 4 chicken sausages
• 1 large red onion
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 4 small honeycrisp apples, cored but unpeeled
  
• 1 "big honkin'" sweet potato
  

1. Get four chicken sausages at Whole Foods or other market of choice. I bought two each: jalapeno/cheese and teriyaki/pineapple.

2. Preheat a dutch oven to 500 degrees in the oven.

3. Add the sausage. They hiss if it's hot enough. Cook about 10 minutes on one side until almost burning. Turn sausage and add one large onion (red is great) quartered with root end intact - it keeps the quarters more together in cooking.

4. Turn the sausages until they're nicely brown on all sides and the onions have caramelized, maybe another 20 minutes. Remove to stove top when done.

5. Immediately add 1/2 cup of orange juice while dutch oven is super hot. It will foam and fizz as the O.J. hits the hot metal (be careful) and mixes with the sausage fat. (Editor's note: I just had an image of O.J. Simpson playing a guitar...is that wrong?)

6. Remove both sausages and onions from heat and set separately aside. Leave the juices in the pan, and heat a little.

7. Add 4 small cored but unpeeled apples (honeyscrisp are nice if you can find them) and one big honkin' sweet potato cut in wedges, 1/4" to 1/2" thick. Coat with the sausage fat and O.J. juices. Place them in a flat roasting pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put that in the 500 degree oven. These cook about 20-25 minutes.

8. Baste with the juice which collects in the apples and any coming out from the onions or sausage, which you have set aside. Watch carefully to avoid burning the apples and potato wedges. The sugars in both burn easily.

9. In the interim, chop up the sausages.

10. When the potatoes and apples are done, combine all together and let the juices mingle a bit.

11. Serve each person an apple surrounded by onion goo (they turn to goo), sweet potato wedges, and sausages. VERY tasty.

Probably should admit to you that I'm drooling on my keyboard right now. I didn't know I was craving gooey, orange-juicey onions until I read this recipe, but now I am!

To be fair to mon papa, the only things I can't have from this recipe right now are the sausages and the O.J. As soon as I'm through the reintroduction phase, though, I'm trying this one fa sho.