I am loving this new (to me, anyway) kielbasa I came across at Jewel when I had a taste for Kielbasa Vinaigrette a few weeks back. Labelled Amish… something (Hills?, Farms?, Riverbend Estates?, Centre?); I have no doubt it comes from some large corporate purveyor of meat products and a decidedly not Amish facility no doubt close to some freeway or other. Still, I don’t care, it is good, and a far sight better, in my not-so-humble opinion than the Happy Farms or whatever alternatives on the market shelves.
So.
I had kielbasa in the fridge.
I wanted kielbasa.
But I wasn’t feeling the love for vinaigrette just at the time.
What to do?
Hmmm, I found this recipe calling for chili sauce and currant jam that had potential; I’d just need to make a few tweaks…
INGREDIENTS
•1 kielbasa, sliced into 1/4 inch pieces
•1 onion, sliced
•Orange, red, yellow and green pepper slices
•1 (14 oz) jar Robert Rothschild Farm Roasted Pineapple and Habanero Dip
•1 (12 oz) jar chili sauce
•1/2 cup water
•1/4 cup brown sugar
Pop the sliced kielbasa into your slow cooker and top with the sliced onion and peppers (I was saving my fresh peppers for Tom Kha Kai Soup – coming later this week – so I used about half a bag of frozen pepper medley slices from Trader Joe’s).
Whisk the pineapple habanero dip together with the chili sauce and the water and pour over everything in the pot (save the brown sugar for later).
Cover and cook for about 90 minutes on high, then stir in the brown sugar, reduce the heat to low and cook for another hour or so; until the sauce is nicely thickened.
At this point, I pulled everything out of the pot and stashed it in the fridge over night. Truth be told, I waited a lot longer than that listed 90 minutes to add the brown sugar, so my sauce took forever to come together and it was past time for dinner when it finally did. Which kind of worked out; because when I took it out of the fridge to reheat the next day, I was able to remove a fair amount of the fat that had solidified on top of the mixture. We had ours over some lovely pappardelle noodles and were most pleased with the results. The pineapple habanero dip was quite zippy, but that 1/4 cup of brown sugar tamed the heat to make a very nice, slightly different, take on Sweet & Sour.
Note: Robert Rothschild Farm stuff can usually be found at ‘gifty’ kitchen and gourmet shops, and is kinda pricy. If you want to try this without the pineapple habanero, mebbe use some hot pepper jelly and a bit of apple jelly? You might could cut out the brown sugar then, too.
Just a thought…