Bratwurst Supper

First frost came Thursday night, September twenty-eighth, earlier than most years. I had been watching the forecast and got the last of the basil in Wednesday evening, cut the whole plants and hung them upside down in the back room the way I have always done, the smell of them filling the hallway for a day before they began to dry. The tender herbs were under cover by dark. The tomatoes still on the vine I picked green and lined them up on the windowsill in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder, where they will ripen slowly through the next three weeks. Some years I make fried green tomatoes and some years I am patient enough to let them turn and some years I do both.

The garlic went in Saturday. I plant every year in the last week of September or first week of October — sixty cloves of the hardneck variety I have been saving and replanting for twelve years now, which means this garlic has been adapting to this particular Vermont hillside for over a decade and is entirely different from anything you can buy. Hardneck has more character than softneck. The scapes in June are worth it alone. I work the bed with compost, set each clove pointy-end up about six inches apart, cover them, and then they are done until spring. There is something satisfying about planting in the fall, tucking things in for winter rather than coaxing them into growth.

The butternut squash came in over two days — eleven of them this year, which is a good yield from the three hills I planted. They go on the shelf in the back room with the potatoes and onions, where the temperature runs cool and steady through November. Roasted butternut with sage brown butter was dinner on Friday, the first squash of the season always tasted with particular attention because it sets the standard for all the others. This one was excellent — dense and sweet, not watery the way they can be in a wet summer. The brown butter and sage is a combination Helen discovered in a magazine in about 1989 and never let go of, and neither have I.

I wrote the chicken stock entry for Teddy's curriculum and sent it to him as a document he could keep alongside his notes from the summer program. I tried to write it the way an old cook would explain it rather than the way a culinary school would — emphasis on the cold start with bones, the long patience, the importance of never letting it boil hard. He wrote back with one question: why cold start? I sent him a paragraph about protein extraction and cloudiness and he replied with a thumbs up, which at sixteen apparently means he has absorbed the information satisfactorily.

By Saturday evening the garlic was in the ground, the squash was on the shelf, and I had been on my feet since first light — the kind of day that earns its dinner rather than just requiring it. Helen used to say that after a day of real work you don’t want anything fussy, and she was right about that the way she was right about the brown butter and sage. A bratwurst supper is exactly the sort of meal that suits the end of a hard fall week: one pan, good heat, nothing to overthink, and enough substance to actually feel it when you sit down.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 bratwurst links (about 1 1/4 lbs)
1 lb baby potatoes, halved
2 cups green beans, trimmed
1 medium yellow onion, sliced into half-moons
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon whole-grain mustard, for serving
Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat oven to 400°F. In a large cast-iron skillet or heavy oven-safe pan, toss the halved potatoes and sliced onion with olive oil, caraway seeds, smoked paprika, salt, and pepper until evenly coated.
Start the potatoes. Spread the potato and onion mixture in a single layer and roast in the oven for 15 minutes, until the potatoes just begin to soften and the onions start to color at the edges.
Add the bratwurst. Remove the pan from the oven and nestle the bratwurst links among the potatoes. Return to the oven and roast for another 15 minutes.
Add the green beans. Scatter the trimmed green beans and minced garlic over the pan, tossing them lightly into the drippings around the potatoes. Return to the oven for a final 8—10 minutes, until the bratwurst are cooked through and lightly browned and the beans are tender-crisp.
Rest and serve. Remove from the oven and let the pan rest for 3 minutes. Garnish with chopped parsley and serve directly from the pan with whole-grain mustard on the side.

Nutrition (per serving)

Bratwurst Supper — A Hearty End to a Hard Week of Harvest