Product Review: Aidells Cajun Style Andouille

This is one of my favorite busy-day go-to dinners: chicken sausage + whatever I have in the freezer, which is usually cooked rice or couscous that I've portioned into zip-bags and frozen, and frozen broccoli (remember my post about rescuing frozen broccoli?). This time I added a simple salad of romaine lettuce and shredded Parmesan cheese with an oil-vinegar dressing. I love the sausages because they are super-fast to prepare. They're fully cooked, so a quick visit to a hot skillet and they're ready to go. I've also put them on the grill--Yum...

My standard chicken sausage is a spinach-and-asiago-cheese variety that comes from Sam's Club (they are so good, and only 3 WW Points each--5 Points for 2), but this time I decided to try a sausage my local grocery store was promoting: Aidells Cajun Style Andouille. I was interested to try it, partially because it was different than my usual sausage, but mostly because it was listed as "not recommended" in a comparison of Andouille sausage in one of my recent Cooks Illustrated magazines. I wanted to know if it was a horrid as their tasters thought.

(Sorry, I can't for the life of me find the issue of the magazine, or remember specifically which sausage they loved, just that it was an expensive mail-order sausage--and I'm not going to mail-order my sausage. If I find it I'll update this post.)

My verdict? I thought it was pretty good and tasty, tasty enough I wondered what the sausage the good folks at Cook's Illustrated loved tasted like. It was also very spicy, and I like spicy. One negative was that it's 4 WW Points each sausage (170 cal/12g fat/1g fiber). Boo! But even given that I'd be willing to buy them again.