Honey-Garlic Sausages Roasted with Rutabaga

I love rutabaga, and I saw a big pile of them in the grocery store last week. It was a huge pile actually. Canadians must love rutabaga, because back in the United States it's rare a person has ever even heard of it. I love the flavor--it's kind of smoothly textured like a squash, but it has a little bit of a spicy bite like a turnip. It's a pale yellow when raw, and turns a more medium yellow-orange when cooked.

My granny really liked to make rutabaga. Her cooking tendencies were decidedly Southern; I don't know if rutabaga is a Southern thing or whether she just liked the vegetable. She always boiled the rutabaga and put bacon bits in it. And from memory (and I could be wrong), she always added some maple syrup or brown sugar or something to it. It always tasted a bit sweet to me. Or maybe she only put sugar on acorn squash. I can't remember--Mom'll have to help me out a bit here. Mom are you out there?? Haha. Anyway, it doesn't matter, those are the flavors I like with rutabaga: porky and slightly sweet. I made rutabaga a couple of times in college with maple bacon, because rutabaga is a really economical vegetable choice. It sells for something like 68 cents a pound.

I bought a rutabaga from the big pile I saw in the Canadian grocery store last week. Only I didn't really know how I was going to use it, and it ended up sitting in my fridge for a few days. Then, when I went shopping later in the week, I saw these honey-garlic sausages for sale. I believe that they were the Johnsonville brand. I bought them, thinking they'd be perfect cooked with rutabaga--porky sweetness.

To make this combination for dinner, I peeled the rutabaga and cut it into 3/4" pieces. I put some olive oil in the bottom of a baking dish and added the rutabaga. After seasoning the rutabaga liberally with salt and pepper, I laid the honey-garlic sausages over top and drizzled the entire dish with a little bit more olive oil. I roasted the whole thing in the oven at 375 or 400 degrees for about an hour.

It was perfect! The honey-garlic sausages definitely had some sweetness, but not so much that it was overwhelming or gross, just enough to complement the rutabaga. In fact, the honey-garlic sausages were so good that I would eat them on their own even if I didn't need a sweet pork compliment. Some of the fat came out of the sausages, infusing the rutabaga with pork flavors. I served the rutabaga and sausages with some egg noodles, and it was a really satisfying meal. And it reminded me of my granny.