Sweet Italian sausage cheesy rice: Quick and inexpensive dinner meal for a busy night

Sometimes when making meals we get bored of using the same meats over and over. There are so many things you can make with ground beef and chicken but sometimes you just want something different.
Most of the time those different things end up being more difficult and time consuming than chicken and ground beef recipes for us. Not to mention the price of most meats lately have been un-justifiable for a single meal. This recipe only took me an hour, and the sausage costed around 5$.
You’ll love this recipe because it can cook up in under an hour. It’s a fairly simple recipe with room to improvise and add more things as you see fit.
This meal feeds around 6 making it perfect for a big family or better yet meal prepping.

The ingredients

• Sweet Italian sausage (Around 5$ at Walmart)
• Jasmine rice
• Chicken stock
• Salt
• Pepper
• Butter
• Olive Oil
• Spinach
• Onion powder
• Garlic powder
• Italian seasoning
• chicken bullion powder
• Cheese. Parmesan shredded cheese, Parmesan grated cheese, and Italian style shredded cheese.

The recipe

First things first you’re going to start the rice. Since this takes the most time, you’re going to want to start this first. For this recipe I used 2 cups of jasmine rice cooked according to what it said on the package (mine said 1.5 cups of water per cup). You can use any kind of rice for this recipe.

What’s going to elevate this recipe

A huge tip of mine to add more flavor to your rice recipes is to flavor infuse your rice while its cooking. The rice absorbs all the water you’re cooking it with. So, make it flavorful. For this recipe I added chicken bouillon powder, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder. I also threw in a tablespoon of butter.

The meat

While the rice is absorbing all that flavor we’re going to start making meatballs out of these sausages. You’re actually going to take the sausage casing off of each one with some cooking scissors and just roll pieces of them into meatballs. You don’t have to add any spices or ingredients to these.
Next your going to fry them in a frying pan with some butter and oil until they are just browned on each side.

Rice is absorbed, meatballs are browned

At this point your almost done, I hope you’re enjoying this recipe and think its easy! All you really need to do now is combine everything. I added the rice and the sausage to the wok. Added 2 cups of chicken broth and let that simmer until that absorbed as well. I think of this step as merging all the flavors together.
Most of the time making this recipe is really just waiting for water and broth to absorb.

Stir in the spinach

Once all the chicken broth is absorbed you can add some spinach. I put about a cup of spinach, but I didn’t measure exactly.
Here’s a tip to always have some spinach on hand: Freeze it! Once you freeze it, you’re not going to want to eat it in a salad or anything but it’s perfect for recipes like these. Since we don’t use it every single week it’s good to not have to go grab some the day of, or to worry about it going bad.

Add some cheese and you’re done!

The amount of cheese you add to this is really up to you. I used a cup and a half of cheese total. A half cup of parmesan shredded, grated, and a half cup of Italian style.

Some recommendations for variations

I almost added mushrooms to this recipe instead of spinach. I avoided any kind of chopping vegetables into this recipe just because I wanted it to be as quick as possible. But you could add garlic and onion first before throwing the rice in the pan. Although we have onion and garlic powder in the recipe, it could have a stronger taste with those elements actually in there.
Different cheese experimentations with whatever you have on hand would also be a nice variation. I can see this tasting really good with some provolone or Swiss cheese.