Sausage and rice recipes taste great, and many are one pan or skillet meals, perfect for cooking in a cast iron skillet. So quick and easy for weeknight dinners, with all kinds of smoked sausage to try.
These recipes call for various types of sausage. Some are for breakfast sausage or pork sausage, which are pretty interchangeable in recipes.
Others call for kielbasa or andouille. Kielbasa has a different flavor from breakfast sausage and andouille is a bit more spicy.
You can make a lot of sausage substitutions. Have hot links if you love spice. A lot of vegan or vegetarian sausage substitutes will work in these dishes.
You could probably use chorizo in just about any of those. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a leaner pork sausage and packs a lot of flavor and has a chunkier texture than pork sausage.
This recipe falls somewhere between red rice & beans and jambalaya. It's got all that Cajun flavor. It's hearty enough for a one dish meal, but you could also serve some cornbread along with it.
It features andouille, which is a slightly spicy sausage. Not like hot links, but definitely a little more spicy than kielbasa.
You can absolutely use additional or other meats in this dish, like shrimp or chicken.
This dish uses breakfast sausage and apples to get a savory-sweet flavor. It works as an alternative to traditional bread stuffing.
There's apples, onions, sage, thyme and more, and they're all cooked together with the rice and sausage in chicken broth.
This one calls for basmati rice, which is my personal favorite and what I'll put into nearly any recipe whether it's called for or not. If basmati isn't a good option for you, jasmine is a great substitute.
This is a Chinese fried rice dish made of vegetables, sauces and meat. It uses beef sausage and frozen vegetables to make your cooking easier. Oyster sauce contributes a lot to its special flavor, along with ginger and garlic.
Aside from the fact that you have to cook the rice and egg ahead of time, this is a one-skillet dish that's hearty enough to be a full meal.
Red beans and rice is a staple of creole cooking. Making it in the Instant Pot makes it extra quick and saves you the trouble of presoaking the dried beans. The Instant Pot takes care of all that.
This is serious comfort food. It's a one-pot dish, which makes dinner very easy. You're combining red beans with delicious andouille sausage, adding some Cajun seasonings, and serving it with rice.
And of course there's also what's called the Holy Trinity of Cajun and Creole recipes:chopped onion, celery and green pepper. So much flavor.
Gumbo is such a memorable dish. This version goes gluten free by leaving out the traditional dark roux. (You can add that roux in, if you prefer.)
The seasonings in this are just amazing. Along with garlic and onions and Cajun seasoning, you get smoked paprika, file powder and bay leaf. These are some wonderful flavors.
You have to brown the chicken, so a slow cooker with a browning feature is a big help here.
If you love chorizo, this is the recipe you have to try. Chorizo and long grain brown rice are blended with onions, peppers, tomato and green chiles and a bunch of seasonings.
Instead of the usual red or pinto beans, you use black beans, which give it a deeper flavor and have a less mushy texture than other beans.
Sausage gives this wild rice soup some extra flavor. This is an easy meal to make, and it's great for batch cooking because you can freeze it and serve it later. It's even gluten-free.
This is a quick and easy weeknight dinner that just needs a few ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. It's filling enough to be a whole meal. And it only takes about thirty minutes to make.
Onions, garlic and bell pepper give it lots of flavor. But so does the ground breakfast sausage.
Hollow out some green bell peppers, add rice, sausage and some veggies to them, melt cheese on top, and you've got a whole dinner in one neat package.
And you can use whatever sausage you like. Ground sausage is the easieset one to work with. But you could certainly dice a hot link or andouille or kielbasa to get those delicious flavors in this.
Dirty rice is a delicious Creole dish. This is an Instant Pot version of it that's quick and easy to make, but still has much of the same flavor (just not the chicken liver).
This one calls for pork sausage, like a traditional breakfast sausage. You can also use turkey sausage or add kielbasa.
It's seasoned with onion, bell pepper and celery, along with a Creole seasoning blend. You can chop fresh veggies, but this recipe calls for frozen ones to save you time.
This is a slightly updated mid century comfort food casserole. Instead of white rice, you use brown.
It also uses a canned soup, one of the "Cream of-" varieties. You can choose chicken, mushroom or celery, depending which you like best.
In addition to the rice and cream of whatever soup, it has sausage, celery, onion, chicken stock and red pepper flakes. It's a flexible recipe you can modify, so if you're missing an ingredient or want to substitute something you prefer, go for it!
This gluten-free rice dish combines breakfast sausage, dehydrated apples and sage for flavor. Spinach and pine nuts add a nice fresh taste and some crunchy texture.
It only takes 15 minutes prep and 30 minutes to cook, so it's an easy dish for evenings.
This is an easy and tasty one-pot meal. It mostly cooks itself, and there's not a lot of prep time.
It blends spicy Italian sausage with brown rice, white beans, tomatoes, spinach, onions and seasonings.
Yet another one-pan recipe for easy prep, cooking and cleanup. This one uses turkey kielbasa with rice and black beans as the base.
To that it adds zucchini, peppers, onions, and some seasonings. Serve it with a veggie side like corn on the cob. Or serve it alone, because it's really enough to be a meal on its own.
This recipe uses Italian sausage with sweet bell peppers, leeks and garlic. A tomato sauce is mixed together with all of that, and just like that, you have an easy dinner.
You can make this one all in one skillet, which is great for cleanup.
This isn't exactly Ramsay's recipe, but that's just fine. Basmati rice, Italian sausage, dry white wine, and seasonings including smoked paprika give this dish a ton of flavor.