Sausage Balls & Key Lime Pie

    I attended a baby shower this week and will be attending several in the upcoming months because my Bible study chicas weren’t playing around with the whole “be fruitful and multiply” command ;) I signed up to bring cheese and crackers, but of course when came down to actually doing that, I wasn’t feeling it. I also didn’t have a lot of money to make anything too fancy, so I decided to try out a recipe (I got the basics from her) from a MOPS mom :) There are several places to find this recipe, just google “sausage crescent roll balls” or “sausage balls.”
    Ingredients:

• 1lb ground sausage
• 1 8oz package of cream cheese, softened
• 2 pkgs of crescent rolls
• Salt and pepper to taste

    That simple! Well the ingredients were simple ha. The construction was a little bit more difficult than I expected, so give yourself time. Brown the sausage and drain. Turn heat to low and add the cream cheese until it melts and incorporates into the sausage. There’s your filling! You can add salt and pepper, which I recommend. I dumped goodness, what seemed a ton of pepper into the filling by accident and was a little scared, but they turned out pretty tasty. Putting it all together for me was difficult for some reason. I needed to make enough for 15-20 people to have at least two, so I decided that I needed to cut the crescent rolls in half somehow; this left some very thin strips of dough with not much room for filling, but I made it work :)

    I rolled them into little balls and tried to pull the corners over the sausage exposed ends so that it made a little basket type thing. You might be able to see it in the picture if you click on the thumbnail (sorry it’s blurry!). If there was a lot of overlap after I rolled the sausage up, I pulled it off and placed the extra dough over the exposed sausage part. For some reason I thought it would fall out, but I think a little less dough might have allowed the sausage filling to shine a little more. This was a good idea and good for a small get together. I usually make pigs in a blanket lol and this was basically the same thing, but it seemed a little nicer :) There weren’t any left at the end of the evening (does it matter that A and I ate about 8 of them? oh my), so they couldn’t have been too bad! The MOPS mom also said she made the filling ahead of time and was able to freeze it until she needed it, which is always a time saver. I think next time I will try it the other way I’ve seen sausage balls done: with biscuit dough and sausage formed into an actual ball. I wonder if you could wrap these in puff pastry instead of the crescent rolls? Thoughts?

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    Now onto the best, most wonderful, awesome Key Lime Pie ever. My dad started making this pie years ago and always made one for me until I realized I could buy the key ingredient at my own local Kroger (doh!). What is this key ingredient you ask? Nellie and Joe’s Famous Key West Lime Juice. It’s SO good. I can literally eat a whole pie in two days. Really. It’s bad. I’m almost a little sad I realized I could by these near my home instead of having to make the trek to the parentals because now I want to make one a week. Have you checked the ‘nutritional’ content of sweetened condensed milk? Even fat free? I had no idea!
    Ingredients:

• 9″ graham cracker pie crust Note: I use chocolate.
• 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk Note: Fat free, of course!
• 3 egg yolks (whites not used)
• ¹/₂ cup Nellie & Joe’s Key West Lime Juice
• scant (a bit/little less than) ¹/₄ of sugar Note: My dad adds this, and I can’t imagine the pie without it, but it doesnt come from Nellie and Joe.

    Combine milk, egg yolks, sugar and lime juice. Blend until smooth. Pour filling into pie crust and bake at 350º for 15 minutes. Allow to stand 10 minutes before refrigerating. Just before serving, top with freshly whipped cream, or meringue, and garnish with lime slices. <–I don't serve it with anything and I eat it straight out of the pie tin :) My dad has also added another little twist at times which makes for a superbly terrific pie. He will melt some chocolate (a Hershey bar) and pour it into the bottom of the crust before putting the key lime filling in. It needs to be a thin-ish layer because one time it was almost ¹/₄” thick and after being refrigerated, no one could cut into it! :( It was very sad. Anyway, C doesn’t like this pie. It’s pretty tart, but I love it. Probably one of my favorite pies if not the favorite.