Happy 2025 y’all! I hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start. It’s been an adventurous start on my end, but I’ll get into the specifics on that a different week. For this week, I wanted to start off 2025 with another new recipe. We tried this one this week and it was YUMMY. It’s also a lot easier than I first thought it was, and it’s an excellent comfort dish to have on these cold winter days.

It’s called a Sausage Hot Pot, which is something I have personally never heard of before. I saw it on Instagram and the video looked delicious, so I thought I’d give it a try. Here are the ingredients you will need for this dish:

1. 4-5 strips of bacon, chopped into little pieces
2. Pork sausage links (either the individual links, or one long one)
3. 1 large white onion
4. 2 medium carrots
5. 2 cloves of garlic
6. 3 Tbsp butter
7. 3 Tbsp flour
8. 2 cups of Beef Stock
9. 2 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
10. 1 tsp Dijon Mustard
11. 1/4 tsp each of Rosemary, Thyme, and pepper
12. 1 Beef Bouillon Cube, crumbled
13. 14 oz. bag of baby potatoes
14. Salt as needed

At first glance, this recipe looks a little more involved than some of the other recipes I’ve shared before, but I promise it’s actually pretty easy.

You’re going to start by chopping up those strips of bacon into tiny little bacon bite pieces and throw them in a frying pan until they are cooked to your desired crispiness. Remove them from the pan and set aside. Leave the bacon grease in your pan.

Next, you’ll take your pork sausage and cook that in the leftover bacon grease. The recipe calls for six individual sausage links, but I couldn’t find any in the store. Instead, I used one long pork sausage link and cut it into pieces. It worked just as well. Get those good and browned, but don’t worry about cooking them all the way through – it’ll finish cooking later. Remove the sausage from the pan and set aside, again leaving behind any grease.

Lower the heat to medium, and add your carrots and onion, cooking until they are soft. Add the garlic and cook for roughly 30 seconds and melt in your butter. Once the butter is melted, you’ll add the flour and mix together to form a roux. Slowly stir in the beef stock and it’ll gradually get thicker, like gravy. If it feels thin, feel free to add more flour until desired thickness.

Once it’s to a thickness you like, add the Worcestershire sauce, spices, Bouillon, and Dijon Mustard and mix well. You can then add your bacon and sausage back to the mixture until coated.

At this point in the process, your kitchen is going to smell amazing, I promise you.

You will then add the gravy mixture to a greased baking dish and let it sit for about 15 minutes, allowing a skin to form on top.

During this wait, you can slice the baby potatoes into roughly 1/4 inch slices and lay them over the filling, working from the outside in (picture below). Once all the potatoes have been added, brush some melted butter over the top and season with salt.

Set the oven to 350 degrees, cover the baking dish with tin foil, and bake for 30 minutes. When the 30 minutes is up, increase the temperature to 400 degrees, remove the tin foil, and bake for another 20 minutes. When finished, remove from the oven and allow to sit for at least five minutes to allow the filling to settle.

And then dig in!!

I’ll admit I was a little nervous to try this dish. I’ll try almost anything that has potatoes in it, but I wasn’t sure how the rest was going to turn out. But I can honestly say it was delicious and I’ll be making it again soon. It’s definitely a good recipe that will warm your belly on these cold winter days.

I hope you get a chance to try it out, and let me know what you think if you do.

Stay warm everyone!

Until next time! 🙂

Megan Nelson