Cheesy Sausage & Apple Quinoa Bites

Savory little bites full of good cheesy sausage flavor with a hint of apple; to me, they’re like a portable, bite size egg bake. Perfect for breakfast snacking, brunches, afternoon, or whenever a little hunger or cheese/sausage craving strikes.

I can’t exactly remember why I made the quinoa (probably just because it’s yummy), but I had leftover quinoa in the fridge and lots of honeycrisp apples (from my dad’s tree!) and thought it would be fun to do something with apple and quinoa. First I tried some apple cinnamon quinoa bites that had oat bran in them. It sounded like a good idea in principal, but they weren’t as fun and delightful as I’d hoped. They were pretty good fresh out of the oven, but then they turned into little rocks. It was another food blogger’s recipe and she had all kinds of reviews posted and people seemed to actually like the little lumps of apple cardboard. Me, not a fan. I ate a few, then tossed them into the compost pile to go out to the forest for the squirrels and deer and turkeys. Maybe someday I’ll make my own sweet spiced version of apple quinoa bites, but that recipe really turned me off of the sweet quinoa bites idea.

I still had about a cup of quinoa left and really wanted to make something yummy with it.

And then I remembered when I was little, my gramma used to put cheddar cheese on her apple pie. At the time I thought that was really odd, but now that I’m grown, I think apples and cheese could definitely be a thing. So I got to thinking about what people do with apples in a savory sense and I thought oooooh … what about some little cheesy apple quinoa bites? With some good sausage sprinkled in? Yeah, baby, now you’re talkin’!

I went into the kitchen to begin my creation. Opened up my cheese drawer and pulled out some swiss cheese, a nice sharp white aged cheddar and some Asiago. They all sounded like a good pairing for sausage and apple, so I used all three. I mean, why use one cheese when you can have three? A little onion, some finely chopped apple, a couple cloves of garlic, the quinoa and some eggs to help hold it all together.

I couldn’t wait to taste my little cheesy bites when they came out of the oven. I ate a couple of them piping hot, then went back for seconds and thirds. Before I knew it, 5 of them were gone and I hadn’t even started thinking about taking photos yet!

The apple flavor is very subtle here … the pretty apples did kind of fade into the background with all the flavorful cheeses I used, but I’m quite all right with that. I love these little bites just like they are. If you want more apple flavor, use a milder cheese, or you could cut back a bit on the onion and add more apple.

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