Sausage Cheese Apple Balls

A blend of Italian and breakfast sausages with cheese and apple in a bite-size appetizer.

With Fall comes an increase in my kids' busy schedules. Marching band, sled hockey and sewing all happen in the evenings and that means sometimes dinner is actually Substantial Afternoon Snack. A snack like this, with some apple slices, veggies and hummus, and a glass of milk or cider is enough for my kids to fuel up and power through the rest of a long day.

When I set a goal of increasing my vegetable appetizer recipes on the blog at the beginning of this year, I deliberately concentrated on appetizers that don't use meat. Participating in #AppetizerWeek added a bunch to get the ball rolling [goodness, pun was not initially intended but I'm going with it] and I've added some each month. I'm going to broaden this list to include some meat-containing appetizers, starting with these Sausage Cheese Apple Balls.

I made these first while preparing to host a bunch of fellow military spouses, and I was ridiculously distracted in the preparation.  I'm so grateful that Joyce arrived, said 'can I do anything to help?' and took over the baking that night. Because the recipe makes a ton, I froze half of the dough. My son baked them later for a snack and I took some photos. Well, those photos fell into the swamp didn't turn out, so I made up another batch and tweaked it a bit. I now prefer a blend of breakfast and Italian sausage for our snacks.

Just like reading the same words over and over can improve fluency, preparing the same recipes over and over can help with cooking skills. My son is learning to cook by mastering one recipe at a time. Since he loves the classic Bisquik Sausage Cheese Balls it was easy to get him interested in making them again, with a twist. As Lydia commented on my Cheddar Apple Soaked Multigrain Muffins, apple pie and cheddar cheese go very well together, so I figured adding grated apple would work in these appetizers.

This recipe is so simple to throw together, even a teen can make it!

For more recipes using apples, please see my Apple Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For more appetizer ideas, please see my Pinterest boards. Want to know how to use this blog? Click here.

Cheddar Apple Soaked MultiGrain Muffins

Grated apple and cheddar cheese with an assortment of whole grains make these muffins a delicious Fall treat.

What? A departure from my standard soaked oatmeal muffins?  Yep.  The dog woke me up extra early so before I was fully conscious I'd added oats, cornmeal, and whole wheat flour to the bowl with the buttermilk.  The dog went back to bed, and I made muffins.

When I'm solo parenting while my spouse is deployed, a favorite easy meal is apples, popcorn, and a protein. Sometimes it's popcorn with sliced apples and peanut butter, but usually it's a platter of apple slices, cheese chunks, and a big bowl of popcorn. This is easy to fix for dinner & a show treat night.

While my kids were in braces I really missed that meal (no popcorn allowed) and I had to come up with alternatives. I'd been thinking of adding a bit of cornmeal to my muffin batter--the crunch goes nicely with the tender crumb from adding cheese--and I'm pleased with the result.

These muffins are not too sweet, and in fact would be tasty with a bowl of Chicken Cider Stew or spread with some apple butter. Multigrain and multipurpose, I'd say.

Shrimp and Salsa Verde Cornbread Pizza

Shrimp, salsa verde, and cheddar cheese on a cornbread pizza crust

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The inspiration for this pizza came from a dish of grilled shrimp my son made over the summer.  It was spicy and served on corn tortillas and I did not have 100% of the effort involved in making it so of course it was good!  He got the recipe out of a cookbook at our library--one of our family summer reading activities.  We re-created it alongside cornbread in the fall.  When I had leftover cooked shrimp from our New Year's Ever Appetizerpalooza [not to be confused with #AppetizerWeek, that's next week] I decided to try shrimp on a pizza.

This is not my first shrimp recipe--I snuck a Roasted Shrimp, Celery, Grape, and Potato Salad in here last fall--nor is this my first seafood pizza.  Check out my Visual Pizza Recipe Index or the links at the bottom for additional seafood pizzas for your Friday Night Pizza Night.
Even though this wasn't my first rodeo, this recipe was not without dithering.  I was torn, trying to think of a way to duplicate a grits crust.  Or even a cornmeal crust.  Finally I just decided to Keep It Simple.

Keep It Simple, Sillybilly (KISS) is the title of one of my early blog posts before I clued in to making a recipe more searchable by using the actual recipe name in the title.  Revolutionary!  KISS is a recipe post for Beau Monde dip, another vehicle to transfer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share vegetables into my mouth--and those of my family.

What could be more simple than taking my tried and true cornbread recipe and baking it in a 10 inch skillet instead of my usual 7 inch skillet?  Perfect.  The thickness is less than a deep dish pizza, but more substantial than a thin crust pizza.  You can eat this with a fork, or pick it up with your hands.

With precooked shrimp, pre baked cornbread, and put up (or store bought) salsa verde, this pizza assembles and bakes very quickly.  Perfect for a last minute pizza or easily one where you don't have yeast or don't feel like fussing with dough.  Mix it up, pour it in, bake, prep the toppings, top, and go.

Beef and Cheddar on Pumpkin Pizza Dough

A hearty pizza of roast beef, mixed with barbecue sauce and topped with cheddar, on a roasted pumpkin pizza crust

I realized that despite the large amount of cow in the freezer, I rarely share very meaty pizzas.

I think it stems from a desire to Use All The Vegetables from the farm share, plus a desire to decrease the amount of meat per serving, but regardless of the desire, the end result is that we rarely eat a (homemade, at least) very meaty pizza.

This is a very meaty pizza.  I had leftover shredded beef (Sarah at Imperfect Kitchen's Perfect Pot Roast sounds like a good way to have some leftover shredded beef) as well as a pumpkin pizza crust, and I wanted the opposite of the Pumpkin and Black Bean pizza I shared last week.

It worked--this is nothing like that pizza, though if you gave me a slice of each I'd eat them both real fast.  I'd finish with this one, though, because the BBQ beef and cheddar flavors want to linger on my tongue.  [I like my last bites of a plate of food to be my favorite ones.  Strange, I know.]