Sunday Dinner: Lentils, Homemade Sausage, Reibekuchen

This menu started as a way to simultaneously use up some of the smoked sausage we had left in the fridge and to test a recipe for reibekuchen. Since the leftover sausage was actually chorizo, not smoked sausage, and since TJ's didn't have any non-Italian sausage without "olives" I ended up making my own sausage. So the dual-purpose meal turned into a single-purpose meal... at least it wasn't completely without purpose. :-)

Here are notes for the components:

For the sausage I started with a recipe from JPT (for lentils with sausage and cabbage), but I used ground turkey instead of pork (TJ's didn't have any decent looking pork). I started with 10 whole allspice berries and ground them in a mortar and pestle with the fennel seeds, otherwise I pretty much followed the sausage recipe. This made some really nice sausages.

I did a standard lentil prep with black lentils (Indian dal, someday I need to remember to get lentils du Puy) and starting from a mirepoix. For garlic I used the remainder of the braised garlic from last week (4-5 cloves) and added 2 cloves of garlic paste just before the lentils were done. I added a couple leaves of sage to the herb mixture.

The Reibekuchen recipe is from my Niederrhein cookbook. Some notes:

1. Wringing out the shredded potatoes is a good trick to remember for other stuff.
   
2. Making a quarter recipe produced 6 hand-sized reibekuchen. That's 2 servings (maybe 2.5).
3. I used about 1/4 of a medium-sized yellow onion in the recipe.
   
4. Pre-cooking the reibekuchen, holding them at 250 degrees, and then "refreshing them" in a hot pan for a couple of minutes before serving seems to work pretty well.
5. TJ's chunky applesauce tastes good, but it's a bit too chunky. Maybe a quick whir in the food processor will get it right?
6. mmmm, Reibekuchen.
   

To accompany all this goodness we had a green salad with romaine, dandelion greens, and pimento from the CSA box topped with a lemon vinaigrette.