Recipe challenge, week four: Holland House Red Wine Vinegar, Polish sausage, plums and sweet potato

Bob Conidi: My reaction was relief since the ingredients were pretty common, although the combination was quite random. I immediately began tossing around ideas in my head. I thumbed through some cook books, and then went to the Internet. ... I really did not spend a lot of time researching, maybe two to three hours over the weekend.

I thought I had a plan set, but I was looking for a particular recipe when suddenly the thought of pizza came to me, which is not too uncommon to happen at 9 p.m. when I am hungry! I looked at a couple of pizza cookbooks that I have and found a recipe for potato dough, I figured I could substitute sweet potato in the recipe.

Working in the wine vinegar was the toughest of all. I oven-tested a few ideas with the plums but finally settled on the caramelized onions. I have also put fruit on pizza before, so the plum thing was nothing out of the ordinary. I was not satisfied with the sweetness from the plums I had bought so I added some “natural sweetness” with the honey. By 1 a.m. the pizza was in the oven. By 1:30 my stomach was full and I was pleased with the recipe I created.

Penny Kazmier: I love sweet potatoes and had actually secretly hoped they would be in my mystery bag, but when I saw the other ingredients I knew I had my work cut out for me. Smoked sausage is already seasoned and basically fully prepared, so I didn’t feel like I could use my usual protein treatments like marinades or rubs which stumped me at first. ... A good friend made a dish last winter called halushki, something I had never tasted before, but pure comfort food with noodles, cabbage and onions as primary ingredients. That was my inspiration. I made her recipe at home a couple weeks later and added a few twists of my own including smoked Polish sausage.

I knew I needed noodles, but felt I couldn’t include both noodles and sweet potatoes, so after a couple of experiments I came up with a sweet potato egg noodle that provided a bright orange color and great flavor to compliment the other halushki ingredients. The red wine vinegar provided the much needed acidic component to balance the dish.

I had two options for the plums and first tried to use them in an onion and plum compote … I felt my plate needed something with some bright colors, so I decided on the salad.