When it comes to seasonal produce, summer loves the spotlight. It’s the season of tomatoes and corn, blueberries and watermelon, and more juicy stone fruit than your pies and cobblers can handle. But fall—when the days get shorter, leaves change, and pumpkin spice infiltrates everything from lattes to underarm deodorant—might just be the most glorious time to browse the produce department.
Fall is harvest season, after all, and its bounty of heartier fruits and vegetables happens to taste great with chicken sausage. Apples, potatoes, squash, cranberries, pumpkin: It’s a veritable cornucopia of colors and flavors just begging to share a plate with sausage.
The trick is pairing the right sausage with the right fall produce. Here are some of our favorite ways to combine Italian Herb, Melty Cheddar, and Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage with the best of the season. No boring, lackluster plates here. Just big warm hugs and, yup, maybe even a little pumpkin spice, as the law of fall dictates.
Potatoes
Best Paired With: Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage
Potatoes are the powerhouse of the produce section: versatile, affordable, incredibly filling, and delicious at pretty much any hour of the day. Boil 'em. Mash 'em. You get it, precious.
For breakfast, peel and dice your potato of choice along with an onion and some bell pepper. Crumble in Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage, then add parsnips, butternut squash, plenty of garlic, and a few red pepper flakes for an incredibly easy autumn sausage and potato hash.
For a lunch or dinner that can easily feed a crowd—and happens to be perfect for meal prep—mash creamy Yukon Gold potatoes and use them to top an impressive shepherd’s pie. For the filling, mince a package of Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage and sauté it with aromatics like celery and carrots, plus umami bombs like soy sauce and tomato paste. You’ll wonder why you don’t make this more often.
Butternut Squash
Best Paired With: Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage
Bright orange butternut squash doesn’t just look good on the plate. It’s packed with vitamin C and fiber, with a naturally sweet, nutty flavor that gets even richer when roasted. That sweetness pairs especially well with deeply savory Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage.
That combination forms the base of this easy fall sheet pan dinner, which also features chickpeas, Brussels sprouts, and carrots. Everything gets tossed with fresh sage and pumpkin pie spice before roasting until golden. Eat it as is, or serve it over a chewy grain like farro.
Apples
Best Paired With: Melty Cheddar Chicken Sausage
One of the best parts of fall is bundling up in flannel and boots and racing around an apple orchard, picking as much fruit as you can possibly stuff into a basket. Then comes the fun part: turning those crisp apples into everything from apple butter and cider to beautiful apple hand pies.
Or take them in a savory direction and pair them with Melty Cheddar Chicken Sausage. Crisp, tart apples and salty cheddar are a natural match.
Turn the apples into a quick broccoli slaw and pile it onto a bun with a grilled, gently charred sausage for a speedy fall lunch. Get the recipe here.
With the rest of the apples and another package of Melty Cheddar Chicken Sausage, make a big pot of this simple but hearty lentil soup. Tart Granny Smith apples work particularly well with the cheesy, savory notes of the sausage. Follow it with apple pie for dessert, obviously.
Cranberries
Best Paired With: Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage
The poor cranberry is usually relegated to either the juice aisle or the Thanksgiving table, then forgotten about for the rest of the year. That is a mistake. The tart berry tastes great well beyond November and pairs exceptionally well with chicken sausage.
Toss dried cranberries with crumbled Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage, cubed bread, and plenty of herbs to make an addictive stuffing. And yes, you can—and should—eat stuffing outside of Thanksgiving.
For a clever appetizer, turn fresh or frozen cranberries into a beautifully spiced chutney, slice Classic Roasted Chicken Sausage into ½-inch coins, then tuck everything into puff pastry with squares of Brie. The result is a sweet-savory puff pastry bite that’s built to impress. The sausage’s classic savory flavor plays especially well with tart cranberry and rich, buttery Brie.
Pumpkin
Best Paired With: Italian Herb Chicken Sausage
Pumpkin is most commonly deployed in sweet dishes like pies, quick breads, and muffins, but its mild, earthy flavor makes it a natural addition to savory dishes too. You could buy whole pumpkins, break them down, roast them, and purée the flesh yourself—or you could just buy a can of pumpkin purée. We won’t tell anyone.
If you do go the whole-pumpkin route, make sure you grab one grown for eating rather than carving. Cooking pumpkins tend to be denser and more flavorful, while carving pumpkins are usually stringier and considerably less pleasant on the plate.
Few things are more comforting than a gigantic bowl of creamy pasta, and what makes this one so good is the combination of creamy pumpkin and Italian Herb Chicken Sausage. The sausage brings Calabrian chili and basil, which balance the pumpkin’s natural sweetness, while sage brown butter rounds the whole thing out. Who needs a pumpkin spice latte when you can have pumpkin sausage rigatoni?