Peasant food is the best food. Let's make some!

I actually had this mix of onions, apples, precooked chicken sausage, and cabbage quite awhile ago. However, it's totally appropriate to the dank days of winter, so let's talk about it now.

While we cooked the aromatics first, it's also totally possible to start out by cooking the sausage. In that case, I'd just cook to brown and render off some fat; that way you can take out the meat, sauté the vegetables in the rendered fat, and add the browned meat back in near the end. Since we were using chicken sausage, though, we knew there wasn't going to be an overabundance of fat to render off. If you want to use pork sausage, or substitute some bacon/etc. in, I'd definitely start with the meat and cook the veg in the rendered fat.

For those of you who don't eat meat, I'm sure an appropriately spiced seitan sausage culled from your freezer stash would also work well.

Cabbage, sausage, onion, apple

olive oil
onion
apple
precooked sausage/seitan/etc. of your choosing
green cabbage
salt, pepper

Cut your onion in half and slice each half into long strips. Sauté the onion in a slug of oil while you slice the apple into 1/4 inch pieces. When the onion has softened, add the apple and cook together, stirring occasionally, until the apples start to turn golden brown. Cut up your sausage of choice and shred a big chunk of cabbage while you're waiting.

At this point, scrape the apples and onions to one side of the pan. Put a little dab of oil in the free space (if you're using a lean meat or seitan sausage), and add your sausage. Cook until browned, then flip and brown the other side.

When everything is brown and tasty, mix up all the business in the pan, season with salt and pepper, and scrape everything to the side again. Add your shredded cabbage to the various oil and fat left in the pan; sauté with salt and some pepper. I wilted my cabbage for a little over five minutes, so it still had some bite. If you want to go for thoroughly wilted cabbage, be my guest. In hindsight, I wish we'd had a little caraway seed to add. If you have some, you might want to try it.

When the cabbage is done to your liking, adjust the seasonings and serve. I used the cabbage as a bed for the sausage/onion/apple mixture, which worked out well. It would also be fine to mix everything up in the pan and serve it like that.

This business would be great with a bunch of buttered toast or a whack of mashed potatoes. Hell, if you have some leftover potatoes, go ahead and add them to the pan! You might as well absorb every last bit of tasty onion-apple-sausage fat, right?