Easy Week Night Dinners Brats and Cube Steaks

I know how to make sausage, and now that I’ve seen how laws are made, I’ll stick with sausage.
Tom Colicchio 

This past weekend I made two easy recipes one from Adam Perry Lang and the other from Fine Cooking.  APL’s bratwurst and with “fortified” sauerkraut a fantastic grilled dish suitable for a pool party or even grilling on the beach.  You can choose to use a use a variety of sausages and hot dogs.  I tried Boars’ Head brand bratwurst for the first time quite different from the sausage-like brats in the meat cases at the super market.  While the brats and sausages were already fully cooked, I still simmered them in the broth for a few minutes as the recipe suggests and grilled them to get some nice grill marks on them.

I also bought the Boar’s Head brand sauerkraut, my new favorite sauerkraut.  The sauerkraut can be prepared and cooked on the grill in a pan suitable for the grill, toss the grilled sausages into the sauerkraut when finished and serve with toasted buns with plenty of good mustard.

The second recipe from Fine Cooking was Parmesan-Panko crusted steaks served with a fresh tomato salsa.  While I have never been a big, fan of “cube steak” because I find it too tough and I remedied that by asking the butcher to run a sirloin steak through their tenderizer.  The result is a very tender steak.  I did not stick to the recipe for the salsa, I used my recipe for an Italian salsa cruda, a few more ingredients, but the basic one in the recipe goes nicely with the steaks.  Parsley, basil, a pinch of marjoram, grated cheese, capers and a touch of EVOO are good additions and any left is great on pasta or used for bruschetta.

Here are the links to the original recipes:

http://www.adamperrylang.com/recipes/printrecipe/bratwurst

http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/parmesan-panko-steaks-fresh-tomato-salsa.aspx