I absolutely loved this dish and have already made it more than once! I love the punchy flavours, and how it's really comforting without feeling heavy or overindulgent. Perrrrrfect for the cooler Autumn nights!

I (obviously) love cooking and baking, but I must admit that I can find regular weeknight cooking to be a bit of a challenge. I'm happy to spend ages in the kitchen on a complicated baking project or putting together an elaborate dinner party, but the actual grind of the day-in-day-out regular cooking can sometimes be overwhelming. For me, it's usually not the actual cooking, or even the shopping, that is the difficult part, it's just making the decision! I'm always thrilled when I can add a new simple weeknight dish to the repertoire!

Enjoy!

One-Pot Lamb Sausage and Kale Orzo
Adapted from Yay! for Food

Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
2 Greek lamb sausages (approx. 180g in total)
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes
6 leaves cavolo nero or approx. 2 cups loosely packed chopped kale leaves
2/3 cup orzo pasta
1 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup grated mozzarella
Grated parmesan, salt & pepper

Method
Heat the olive oil in a large pan that comes with a tight fitting lid over a medium heat. Squeeze the sausage meat out of the skins and place in the hot pan. Cook, stirring, and breaking up the meat until the meat has started to brown and is crumbly.
Add the onion, garlic, and chilli flakes and season with salt and pepper. Cook for approx. 5 minutes or until beginning to soften.
Wash the cavolo nero and remove any hard stems. Finely slice the leaves and add to the pan. Stir to combine and cook until wilted. Add the orzo and stir combine.
Pour over the stock (you may need to add a little extra depending on the dimensions of your pan - you want it to just cover the ingredients in the pan). Bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cover with the lid. Allow to cook for 12-15 minutes or until the orzo is tender and the liquid is absorbed. Remove from the heat
Add the mozzarella and stir through. Taste and adjust seasoning as you like with salt, pepper, grated Parmesan and chilli flakes.
Serves 2-3

Have you made this recipe? Leave a comment below! Tag me on Instagram @sarahcooksblog and hashtag #sarahcooksblog

More quick and easy weeknight dinner options:

• Sesame Peanut Noodles with Crispy Tofu
• Taiwanese Meat Sauce on Rice
• Spiral Pasta with Red Kale, Feta and Pine Nuts
• Orecchiette with Broad Beans and Lemon Ricotta

Topfenstrudel - cream cheese strudel

A Sausagefest for Nine

Pork Schnitzels

Kassler

Bratwurst

Cheese Kranskys

Weißwurst

Frankfurters

Gurkensalat / Cucumber Salad

Rotkraut / Red Cabbage

Käsespätzle / Cheese Spätzle

Käsekuchen / Cheesecake

Spaghetti-Eis

Weißwurst, Frankfurters

As you can see, some of the skins on the Weißwurst split, but they still tasted good. I find that Weißwurst can be divisive - their perfectly smooth filling can be a bit offputting for some people; I love it. (It's kinda like a Chinese fishball). The Weißwurst skin is edible, but most people peel it off.

Front left: Bratwurst, Front right: Gurkensalat

Bratwurst on the left! I gotta be totally honest, we weren't particularly impressed by Wursthütte's Bratwurst - the flavour was fine, but they kinda stuck and fell apart in the pan. Even though we love their smoked sausages and other cold cuts, the Bratwurst weren't quite up to that high standard. (I can heartily recommend the pork sausages from Peter Bouchier for when you're in the mood for a Bratwurst! They also do some great smoked German-style sausages and cold cuts too - def worth a visit). You can (just) see the Rotkraut (red cabbage) in the above photo. I've told you about this numerous times before, but it's a classic German side of sautéed red cabbage (you can get the cabbage, already sliced, in jars or packets, which makes the whole process much faster and easier, with results equally good to cooking it from scratch). You cook some onions in butter with a little flour, add the packet of red cabbage and cook until heated through. Done!

Gurkensalat / Cucumber salad

In addition to the warm cabbage, we wanted a refreshing salad - so a Gurkensalat / cucumber salad it was. The dressing was a mixture of finely chopped onions, white vinegar, fresh chives, and a little packet of Salat Kronung (dried salad herbs). We stock up on these when we go to Germany, but obviously if you were making this at home you could use whatever herbs you like. Delicious.

And that was the meal! It was quite the epic feast! I gotta say, I was worried we'd overbought, but we actually ate almost all of the meat. Great job team! Although in retrospect, this shouldn't have come as a surprise - in our group of nine, there was one German, two hungry young guys with big appetites, one pregnant lady, three members of my own (Malaysian) family, another Malaysian girl, and one three year old girl who loved the Frankfurters! That food never stood a chance!

We did need a bit of a break before we moved onto dessert though. We made two! First up was a traditional German cheesecake - recipe previously written up here as the "Awesome German Cheesecake". This is a really light cheesecake, based on quark, with a nice citrus tang.

Awesome German Cheesecake

Cheesecake

And our second dessert was a fun one, which we were sure our guests would never have seen before - Spaghetti-Eis! This ice-cream treat is one of my favourite things to order at the Eiscafe in Germany. It's an ice-cream sundae in the shape of spaghetti bolognese! They have machines to make it at ice-cream parlours, but at home you can make it with a Spätzle-press (or potato ricer).

Start with some whipped cream in the serving plate, then press your vanilla ice-cream over it. (Heads up, it's hard work).

Pressing the Spaghetti-Eis

Then pour some raspberry sauce over. (Sandra made the raspberry sauce from scratch, cooking frozen raspberries in a pan and then blending them with a little sugar).

With raspberry sauce on top

Finally, sprinkle grated white chocolate over the top. Ta-dah!

Finished Spaghetti-Eis

It was a great dinner! It was so fun sharing our favourite German dishes with our friends.

The menu seems to focus on rustic dishes, done in a luxurious way - think croque madame with Kurobuta ham hock and fried egg ($13.50), lobster roll ($19) or a Flinders Island lamb korma pie with split pea, cumin, mint and crushed cauliflower ($24). There's also a selection of dishes from the char grill BBQ, and a "Menu of the Week" option, where you can do two courses for $39 or three for $49. We went with a couple of dishes from the Char Gril BBQ...

Merguez sausage, brioche roll, crispy onions, house-made pickles - $11

1/4 Charcoal chicken platter with stuffing, house nuggets with selection of 3 salads - $28

From left to right we have a pot of aioli, some crunchy stuffing pieces, the chargrilled chicken breast and wing, three housemade nuggets, and two crispy little wingettes. It was all really, really good. I especially loved the wingettes and the crunchy crunchy nuggets. (Side note: I had to ask the waitress to explain what everything on the platter was - she'd just popped the it down and said, "And this is the chicken" before turning to walk away. It's not a huge deal, and I'm sure I would have figured everything out, but it would have been a shame not to explain what was on the platter, because obviously the chefs put a lot of work into preparing that dish!)

Selection of 3 salads

The salads were also very impressive. I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure what all the individual salads were, though - as I'd already stopped the waitress to explain the chicken dish I was too embarrassed to ask another question. (Not that there's anything wrong with asking, but she seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, and you know, I felt a bit pai seh). So, from memory and my brain: there was a green salad with a few slivers of ham, a really good grain salad (sorry, not sure what the grain was), with a lemony dressing and little crunchy seeds/legumes, a tender piece of roast pumpkin, some really fabulous roast bitter greens, and a generous amount of Jerusalem artichoke salad. Yum yum yum.

This was a huge dish - luckily Sandra helped me with some of the chicken! I think this would be a good meal for one very hungry person - but I'd suggest sharing one between two and leaving room for dessert! Obviously, we had no room for dessert, so I just finished up with a nice coffee, and we bought some pastries to take back to the B&B.

Cappuccino - $3.80

As we lined up to pay and order our pastries, Sandra exclaimed: "Oh my god, look behind you!" Wow! How pretty does this table look?

The Afternoon Tea Spread

I asked one of the waitstaff, and apparently this is the afternoon tea offering! For $25 a person, you get a plate of savoury creations, scones (fruit and plain) with jam and cream, tea or coffee and "a seriously good selection from the pastry table. Woah! It's a cake buffet! If I hadn't just smashed that chicken platter, I would have totally done the afternoon tea. (It looks like it would be perfect for someone like me, who is indecisive and wants to try a little bit of everything). Now I just have another excuse for a road trip!

So, much, much later that evening, we dug into the cakes!

Strawberry cheesecake - $9

The strawberry cheesecake was a set cheesecake (as opposed to a baked one) - the texture of the cheesecake layer itself was quite good, but combined with the (fresh) strawberry jelly layer on top it was a bit too gelatinous for my liking. I would have also preferred a crunchier base. Still, it was nice to try it and I enjoyed the flavours, even if the textures didn't hit the mark for me.

Lemon meringue slice - $9

Spelt shortbread piggy biscuit - $2

I really, really liked the Piggery Cafe, and I'm so glad we stumbled across it! I liked the cosy atmosphere, the dishes we had were great, and I like the whole vibe of the place. I definitely want to go back to try that afternoon tea offering. I'm also looking forward to seeing the remaining ventures on the property as they open up, and to visiting in better weather so we can explore the grounds!