Recipes and Tips for CSA Beginners II: Easy Sausage & Kale

Here's the next post in our series on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. Bradd's sister Julie is writing about her experience as a member of the Greener Partners CSA at Hillside Farm in Media, Pa.

In my last post, I shared all the great produce I took home from the CSA at Hillside Farm, accompanied by what to make with squash, eggplant, corn and other ingredients. I also picked up kale, which I used to be afraid of buying because I didn't know how to cook it. Then I read some examples and came up with my own recipe for Sautéed Sausage & Kale. It was so good I make it weekly now.

I became a big fan of kale cooked like this after discovering the way it melts down in sauce and loses some of the bitterness typical to collard greens, spinach and cabbage. The rainbow stems also make the meal more appealing to the eye.

Recipe for Sautéed Sausage & Kale



To make this dish, I used sausage from my weekly visit to Maiale Cured Meats in the Media Farmers Market. This week’s selection was a buffalo chicken sausage; the week before it was duck sausage cured with goat cheese and strawberries. Wow!!

Sausage and kale simmering away...

Ingredients:

1 pound of sausage (any flavor)
¼ pound of rainbow kale
1 cup of onion
½ to a whole garlic clove (your preference)
2 cups of sliced mushrooms



Instructions:

Spray the pan with olive oil cooking spray (if you like to indulge use a few tbsp of olive oil). Add the onion and garlic and simmer until golden on medium heat. Cut up the sausage to bite-sized chunks and add to the mix. Cover and let cook until the sausage is browned. Add in the mushrooms and top the whole mix with the kale. Turn down to low. Again, let it simmer until the kale has melted down into the mixture – the longer you simmer on low the better the flavor. Enjoy!