Grandpa's Home Cooking

Country Sausage & Rice Casserole

This is a great one dish hearty supper. And it is easy to fix. Use any ground sausage you wish, but if you can find bulk country sausage it is wonderful in this dish. Around here the place to buy it is Cliff's Meat Market. But you can find packages of country sausage at the supermarket too.

I haven't had sausage this good in years! There is nothing to compare with fresh farm prepared country sausage. 

Ingredients:

• 2pound of bulk country sausage, browned 
• 6 cups of cooked rice (2 cups of uncooked rice cooked will yield 6 cups)
• 4-5 stalks of celery, chopped
• 1 large sweet onion chopped
• 1 Green bell pepper, chopped
• 1/4 cup parsley, chopped
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 cup (or more) of chicken broth
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2 Tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley

Note 1: My daughter, Stephanie, makes this dish and she adds a can of the Rotel diced tomatoes with green chiles (mild).  This sounds very good to me!

Note 2: I love white basmati rice. You can buy it in bulk at Whole Foods. Try it. The aroma and taste is wonderful.

Instructions:

1. Chop the vegetables and set them aside.

2. Cook the rice. Rinse the rice with water in a strainer several times. Then pour the rice in a saucepan. Add water to be one index finger knuckle above the rice. Boil until the water is level with the rice. Put a lid on the pan and turn the heat to low. Do not take the lid off of the rice until you're instructed to do it:-) Cook the rice on low for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, set the pan off the burner for an additional 15 minutes to allow the rice to steam. Then take the lid off the pan and use a fork to fluff the rice. Pout the cooked rice in a casserole bowl and set the dish aside.  

3. Brown the sausage in a frying pan over medium heat. Drain the excess oil. Use a spatula to move the sausage into the casserole with the rice. Stir the sausage and rice together. Set the casserole aside.

4. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

5.  Sauté the celery, onions and bell pepper in butter in a frying pan over a low medium hot burner. Add salt and pepper as desired. When the vegetables are cooked through, use the spatula to transfer the vegetables into the casserole dish with the rice and sausage and stir the ingredients together.

6. Pour a cup of chicken broth over the rice, sausage, and vegetables and stir. 

7. Put a lid on the casserole dish and put the casserole in the oven and heat for 30 - 40 minutes. If you need to keep the casserole warm for more time than is needed to reheat the dish, add a little more chicken broth if it is needed and reduce the temperature of the oven to 225 degrees.

8. Sprinkle fresh chopped parsley over the top of the ingredients in the casserole and serve. 

Serves 4-6. Multiply the ingredients as is required to serve a crowd. Make this dish for a church pot luck dinner, covered dish dinner, or bake an extra large casserole in an aluminum pan to take to the community shelter.

Steamed White Basmati Rice

Hey. If you are going to steam rice, do it right! Prepare the rice the way it is prepared by monk’s at a Tibetan Monastery. This recipe comes from, The Kopan Cookbook, Recipes from a Tibetan Monastery Kitchen, by Betty Jung. This is now the only way I prepare rice. When this book was in print a number of years ago, I thought I was reckless when I bought 12 hardback copies for my bookshop, The World Traveller Books and Maps, of Chapel Hill, NC. They were all sold within a week. When I went to reorder the books, they were out of print. It took many years for me to find a copy for myself, but I finally found a used paperback edition and bought it. It has some neat recipes. If you want to try to find a copy, go to the Internet and do a search. They currently have some paperbacks. I am still looking for a hardback edition.

When I buy Basmati rice, I head to the bulk section of our local Whole Foods store. I dump a huge amount into a plastic bag. Check out the aroma. Wow! It smells like popcorn. You can't beat it! Why in the world would you buy boil-in-bag rice when you can buy this?  (Okay, kids buy boil-in-bag rice because it is a quick, no brainer to fix.)

I loved and miss my bookshop. I've pasted in a photograph of a section of the store. I also opened and owned the Way Cool Kids Books of Chapel Hill. I've also pasted a picture of this shop in as well. They appear at the end of this post.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups white Basmati rice (it is okay to use brown if this suits you, but I'll have white!)
• 3 cups of water (more or less according to the instructions below)

Instructions:

Notice I didn't add salt and pepper to the ingredient list. Why would you need it with this delicious rice? I know, I confess I do sometimes when I'm not thinking about what I'm doing. Truthfully, this is a great tasting rice without the condiments.

In a small-to-medium saucepan, rinse the rice 2-3 times with cool water.

Add water to approximately 1 inch or 1 finger joint above the rice.

Cook on medium to medium high heat until the water has boiled down to the level of the rice.

Reduce heat to low. Cover and continue to cook 12-15 minutes. Do not stir or uncover.

Turn off heat and allow rice to steam undisturbed for at least 15 minutes. 

Now you can serve it! 

When serving, fluff with a spoon or fork. (I love to fluff Basmati rice, don't you?)

Here is Ross Pipes World Traveller Books and Maps. This store was located in the Galleria Center on N. Elliott Rd. in Chapel Hill, NC 

Here is Ross Pipes Way Cool Kids Books and Clothes of Chapel Hill, NC. This store was in the Galleria Center on Elliott Rd.