If you weren't careful with last week's recommendation you might still be drunk, so I'm going to take it easy on y'all this week. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to come up with this, but I haven't seen it anywhere else, so there was a bit of trial and error involved.
So the concept is this: take four foods no good tailgate is without, mash them together. Enjoy. Jalepenos, sausage, bacon, and cream cheese... all wrapped up in a nice little package. Continue on for more...
- 4 oz. cream cheese
- 6 large jalepenos
- 1/4 lb sausage
- 12 strips of bacon
In reality, the amount of cream cheese and sausage you need will depend on the size of the peppers. That ratio, though, 4 oz per quarter-pound of sausage, worked out pretty well for me.
Sports
Brown the sausage. Break it up into chunks as small as you can reasonably make them. Mix this sausage in with the cream cheese. Halve, devein, and deseed the jalepenos. If you want this to be really hot, you can mix the seeds back into the cream cheese mixture, otherwise just toss 'em. Pack the cream cheese mixture into the pepper halves, as shown above. Be generous.
Now comes the fun part -- wrap those puppies up in bacon. A full strip seemed to work pretty well on each pepper-half. You'll probably want to put a toothpick through each one to keep them together. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but I would also soak the toothpicks in water for a few minutes to keep them from burning.
At this point I tried a few different ways of cooking them. My preference would have been to grill them, and I think that would've gone really well, but I didn't have a grill at my disposal, so I made due.
I tried frying them, which would've gone better had I used toothpicks, but was still a little awkward to try to get the bacon cooked all the way through. I also tried baking them, and that seemed like it would work, but it was taking forever.
I ended up broiling them for 5-10 minutes and they turned out pretty well. Your mileage may vary on the oven cooking. If you're going to be at a tailgate, though, just toss them on the grill and take them off when they're done.
