Game Sausage Challenge

Marx Foods is currently hosting a game sausage recipe challenge. They split one of their game sausage samplers into 11 different types and decided to send them out to 11 different food bloggers to create an original recipe with the game sausage. The fun part was you had no clue as to what kind of sausage you were getting until it arrived at your door! They shipped it to us Fed Ex over night! I was selected to be one of the 11 participants!

I was sent duck sausage with orange liqueur. I was a little worried when I saw I had duck, to be honest. I’ve never had duck, I wasn’t sure I would like the taste. But, guess what, I LOVED it. The orange liqueur flavor is so tasty. My original recipe when I submitted what I was going to make was to grill the sausage and then incorporate the sausage somehow in a home made roll. At the time I didn’t know what type of sausage I was going to get. When my sausage arrived I was glad to know that we were allowed to change our recipe!

I thought about spring and summer and I thought  to make a fresh spring mix with the duck sausage. I thought about the different types of sauces I could make with the salad. I had a list of about 10 and it finally came down to a blueberry and orange marmalade glaze. The great part about this is that earlier this year my neighbor and I made orange marmalade so I had just enough left to use with this recipe. The great thing about this recipe also is that it made a lot of yummy leftovers!

Ingredients:

4 Duck Sausage with Orange Liqueur Links

2 cups of blueberries

1/2 cup of granulated sugar

2 tablespoons of corn starch

1 cup of water

1/3 cup of orange marmalade

1 cup each of radicchio, romaine lettuce, endive, spinach, tossed together

Directions:

1. Heat grill pan to medium low heat and grill duck sausage on grill pan until halfway cooked, the internal temperature should be about 140 degrees. Cut sausage into half so you end up with  8 pieces of sausage. Cook the 8 pieces of sausage until they reach 160 degrees.  If you cut the sausage before it’s more then halfway cooked, the casing will fall off and then your sausage won’t stay together!
2. While the sausage is cooking, start to prepare the blueberry glaze. First wash and rinse blueberries. Place blueberries in a food processor and process them until they pureed. In a saucepan combine sugar and cornstarch without the heat on, once these are combined add the water and turn on the heat. Add pureed blueberries and cook them  over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is thick. The blueberries sauce should start to bubble, add this point add the 1/3 cup of orange marmalade and gently fold it into the blueberry sauce.  Boil softly for about 2 minutes, or until blueberry glaze mixture is clear.
3. Make a bed on a plate with the spring mix, top with grilled duck, and then top with a few tablespoons of the blueberry-orange glaze.

The polls will open one June 8th and stay open till June 12th, so if you find my Grilled Duck  with a blueberry-orange glaze on a bed of fresh spring mix delicious, vote for me!