Happy Sunday and welcome to this week’s edition of dinner, sorted. Let’s get dinner, sorted. 🫶
This week we have a gnocchi sheet pan bake on the menu. I’ve been craving all the fall flavors and wanted a dish with sausage, sprouts, apples and potatoes. I originally thought a creamy pasta might be good but I quickly changed my mind. My sunday dinner recipes are meant to be something you could eat every day of the week and frankly, while a heavy pasta sounds great, to me it’s more of a one-off meal than a weeknight meal. So here we are with a still cozy but less heavy weeknight meal.
This one is a bit of a riff on one of my old recipes you all love so much: sheet pan sausage, peppers and potatoes with basil aioli.
To start, I knew I wanted apples but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to incorporate them. I toyed with a sprout/apple slaw, but I wanted the sprouts cooked to soak up the sausage, and cooked apples just didn’t seem to fit here, so I figured an apple glaze would bring everything together nicely and get that apple punch I was looking for. I started with a non-alc apple cider but it was really sweet and not robust enough. The alcohol in the cider really brings out another layer of flavor plus the apple punch without overdoing things.
The glaze does take a while to reduce but thankfully it’s pretty much hands off too until you get down to the end, where you quickly whisk in a couple more ingredients and then you’re done.
One final note, it’s very important to cook things on the correct sheet tray to get the full effects (but not too much) of all the flavor profiles. So check out the recipe below for all the details.