I had leftover Italian sausage I needed to use and I was sick of pan-browning them: We did it with the casing off this weekend for a pasta sauce, and whenever I try to brown them whole I'm always worried they're not getting cooked through. So last night I roasted them in a 400 degree oven (thanks to the modern miracle of air conditioning) over white beans.

I mixed a 19-ounce can of white beans with salt, pepper, Italian seasoning mix from Penzey's (oregano, rosemary, marjoram, etc), olive oil and diced tomato in a small casserole, then stabbed four sweet Italian sausages in a few places with a knife and laid them on top. Roasted for 40 minutes in a 400 degree oven. At that point some of the beans had dried out, but the bottom of the sausages were not browned so I turned them and roasted for another 10 minutes. I think I could've turned them halfway and skipped the last 10 minutes, but I don't know how to keep the beans from drying out, except to stir them halfway through, which I guess you could do when you turn the sausage.

The beans end up really good, though, because they soak up all that fat from the pork sausages. Don't want to let that go to waste!

We had a rosemary-syrup-soaked cornmeal cake for dessert, which I thought was fantastic, an odd flavor that really works. The cake ends up dense and polenta-ish from all the syrup, with a nice rough texture and a corny flavor. I'll write it up next.