By Greg B.  I cannot take credit for this.  This recipe came from a friend’s mentor who was discussing this at a science retreat. However, amazingly it just so happened that I had all the necessary ingredients in my fridge at home, and the recipe was so simple that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it!  What’s not to love in this title, Brats, cherries, bacon and grilling things?

I’ll list the ingredients below, but only because I want to retain some kind of format for my recipe posts.  The ingredients are already listed twice in this post!  However, I think this will help highlight how delicious and easy it is to come up with a recipe that involves bacon, wrap another recipe that is delicious in it’s own right in the bacon, and enjoy the outcome!  Ingredients:

• Bratwursts (and I snuck in a few sweet Italian Sausages as well)
• Cherries
• Bacon
• grill.

So, the basic strategy here is to stuff brats with cherries and wrap with bacon, in case I hadn’t made myself clear yet.  I sliced the brats (and sausage) in half, but leaving them still connected, so not entirely in two pieces.  I sliced a bunch of cherries, removed the pits, and places them inside the sausages.  Then, I carefully wrapped them in bacon.  I said carefully because I wanted to make sure that the bacon wouldn’t be flopping all over the place, burning on the grill, or coming loose from the sausage.  So I always made sure my bacon wrapped with the ends down, so they’ll be touching the grill and held in place.

After this, I lit the grill, let the coals get all lit and hot, then placed the sausages on the grill, covered and let cook.  It took a good 15 minutes before I went back out to check on them, but as long as you didn’t make too big of a fire, they probably wont be on fire.  But you’ll want to keep an eye on them.  With the cover on and the vents open, they acquired a nice smokey flavor that was quite nice when eaten!  after about 25 minutes, everything was cooked to perfection and I brought them inside, popped open a table beer and shared among some friends.

The recipe was pretty good.  If I had more time, skill and bacon, i would have liked to have wrapped it a little bit better, but c’est la vie.  The sausages cooked pretty well and the cherries lent some juice, sugar and even a bit of a tart component (these were Renee’s cherries, she didn’t like them since they were more tart than she wanted.  Thus, I put them to good use).  I will say that this was almost all we had as a meal, though I did make some Belgian fries for a side dish.  But between the sausages, bacon, fries and cherries, no one left hungry! It was a nice heavy Germanic meal, but still delicious.