The vital life lesson I learned today while making a Sausage-Apple Meat Pie.

So I made a sausage meat pie with apple and cheese sauce (which is to say, I made white sauce and then I melted cheese in it). It came out great. It was sausage, apple, cheese, all baked up, tasted fine. Nothing unexpected, in other words. The only problem was, there was some cheese sauce left over and some apple bits and a cast-iron pot full of sausage grease. So I said, Well… there’s some cabbage in the fridge from last week. It’s on the verge of getting elderly: better throw in the pot and let it cook up while the pie bakes. So I threw in the cabbage and apple, cooked it at medium until the stuff started to soften up a bit, threw in the cheese sauce and let it cook at low until the meat pie was done.

The meat pie, my wife and I each had a slice. The cabbage, we scraped the pot clean to get at it all. Moral of the story? …Cook cabbage in pork grease. Which is probably a very obvious vital life lesson, but it never hurts to make sure that everybody else is on the same page, as it were.

6 thoughts on “The vital life lesson I learned today while making a Sausage-Apple Meat Pie.”

  1. I agree always cook the greens in the pigs, it is the best of pairings and the apples never, ever hurt. Sage is an excellent addition, and pasties are also proof that God loves us. The fruit of the vine and the malty brew are of course of the penultimate proof, but pie crust wrapped about just about anything come very close.

  3. I get the impression that you’ve never had boiled bacon and cabbage and yes the bacon grease goes into the water with the bacon.

    1. I am willing to concede that bacon might taste good boiled, but if you give me bacon to boil I’m just going to fry it up anyway because that’s what you do with bacon. And if you give me fried bacon and then give me extra bacon to boil, I’m simply going to fry up the extra bacon, too. And, yes, I can do that all day.

  4. Bacon grease also works well for collard greens and brussels sprouts – only way to eat either of those, really.

    1. ‘s the only way I’ll eat brussels sprouts ..
      .
      Cut sprouts in halves or quarters.
      .
      (works either way, I suggest more cuts if the children are practicing with knives, and you want to give them time sharpening their skills)
      .
      Fry 3-5 slices of bacon.
      .
      Dice the cooked bacon and reserve.
      .
      Add the cut sprouts to the hot bacon grease, fry until reduced about 1/3 in volume.
      .
      Transfer sprouts to serving dish, add diced bacon.
      .
      Allow to cool, serve.
      .
      Mew

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