kale, sausage and leek gratin--failure avoided!

we stopped by stokesberry farm's booth at the ballard farmers market a couple of weeks ago, hoping to pick up a whole chicken for roasting. janelle told us she didn't have chickens that day, but offered to show us their chicken sausage with sage and garlic just as an fyi. ok, great, good to know, thanks! about 5 minutes later we were back at her booth, money in hand. i'd just bought some gorgeous kale and leeks from anselmos farm, and had a solid vision of a kale and chicken sausage gratin in mind.

i'd wanted to make the sausage and winter greens gratin from edible seattle for months. when i pulled up the recipe, however, i realized that it was calling for more greens than i'd purchased, and it did not use leeks. so my first revision was to leave out the chard and collards, and add the leeks. revision #2--we had breakfast sausage rather than italian, but at this point we were still largely on track. i followed the rest of the recipe as written, got it in the oven, and then *zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz POP*, smoke started coming up through the eyes on the stove. the lower heating element in the oven was aflame. the oven, tragically, was dead. thus, revision #3--i had to cook the gratin on the stove top, stirring occasionally so it didn't burn on the bottom, then add more cheese to the top and finish it under the broiler for a few minutes to get a crunchy top.

this was a damn good gratin! after all the changes i made on the fly, i couldn't possibly type out what the final recipe was. but that's the beauty of a gratin, and of a well-written recipe--you can make substitutions, you can add your personal touch, evidently in some cases you can even cook it without an oven, and it's still going to be great. just start with awesome ingredients, like the chicken sausage with garlic and sage from stokesberry farms, which was, by the way, so totally delicious that we almost ate it all before i could get it mixed in with the greens.

check out the original recipe, sausage and winter greens gratin, and do with it what you will!

sources:
sausage from stokesberry sustainable farm
kale and leeks from anselmos farms