Day 27 of the 30 Day COVID-19 Dinner Challenge: Apple Gouda Sausage

July 8, 2020 ~Sausage, pepper, and onions. This is one of those meals I remember my mom making and loving it! As long as she made some sweet sausage along with the spicy kind I was good to go. Sausage, pepper, and onions are one of my favorites. My mom did not make it often but when she did it made my day.

The sausage Kate made was from ButcherBox. It had apples and gouda cheese in it. When Kate first mentioned this sausage was in the box I got to thinking: What is gouda cheese?

Gouda has its roots in the Netherlands. It is neither a hard or soft cheese but rather something in the middle, semi-hard. It’s a little creamy, a little nutty. The flavors of the cheese are dictated by where the cows are feeding. This makes total sense and got me thinking about when we were NorCal residents for a few years.

When we lived in Novato, CA, eons ago I remember visiting a cheese store out west in the rural hills of that area. The grasses had a sweet, yet almost bitter scent. We’d go out there for a day trip with the kids once in a while. Get some cheese, sourdough bread, flavored water, and have a picnic outside the store. I’m pretty sure all of it tasted better because the cheese was made there and the cows were in view. Though I wish I had taken some photographs of those moments, it’s okay, because just thinking about it brings me back to the smells, tastes, and sounds of those picnics. Some memories are perfect when they are stored in our minds without photographic proof of their existence. We can enhance them this way and no one can take that away from us with a picture. True, it wasn’t gouda cheese but it was good and to this day I have a love affair with cheese.

The apple gouda sausage we insanely delicious and most definitely repeatable. It wasn’t too high in calories at 270 per serving for the sausage. We had some rice, peppers, and onions for approximately 550 calories per person.