Baked Pork Sausages

Ever since I was a kid, I have preferred hot dogs to hamburgers. And ever since living in Germany for a year, I have preferred sausages. There's something about a hot sausage dipped in spicy mustard that tastes so good. Recently when I was at BJ's, I thought I would take a look at their sausages. I wasn't expecting to find one without any corn products, but, amazingly enough, I did. The ingredient label had perhaps five things on it: pork, salt, spices, and a couple other easily identifiable foods. I decided to take a chance and see if Michael could eat them. And he could, without any ill effects! I was quite excited because I have tried and failed at several brands of chicken sausages, which are labeled gluten-free but still must be contaminated with corn. So the lesson I've learned, and need to remember, is to buy only pork sausages, not chicken sausages, and to buy ones that contain only ingredients that I can identify.

It's still summer, so we could have grilled the sausages outside. However, it's been raining all week so far -- our first rain in quite a while, so I'm not complaining. But I did need to come up with another way of cooking the sausages, and I decided to bake them in the oven. It's so much simpler and less messy than cooking them on the stove. Tonight I made rosemary roasted potatoes and cooked red cabbage to go with the sausages -- a rather German or Austrian-themed meal. The girls ate every bite! We're raising the next generation to like their sausages with mustard, too.

Baked Pork Sausages
serves 2 adults and 2 small children

Ingredients:

• 4 wheat-free and corn-free pork sausages
• 2 yellow onions

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel 2 onions and slice them thickly into slices of even thickness. (I usually cut a medium onion into four slices, keeping all of the rings together in each slice.) Place them on the bottom of an 8"x8" Pyrex dish so that the onions cover the bottom of the dish. You might not use all of the onion slices. Then place the sausages on top of the onion slices so that the sausages are not touching one another. The purpose of the onion slices is to keep the sausages from burning on the bottom of the pan, and to provide a lovely side of onion to your sausage after it's cooked.

When the oven has preheated, bake the sausages for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the thickness of the sausage, until an instant-read thermometer inserted into one of the sausages reads at least 160 degrees. Serve the sausages with the onion slices on the side.