tadpole in the hole

Well, we couldn’t call it “toad”, as we used some of those teeny tiny cocktail sausages that needed eating up after the holiday.

Put the sausages in the oven at gas 6, in my ancient and beloved white enamel gratin pan which cooks Yorkshire Pudding like a dream, although it is a horror to wash up, especially now we have no dishwasher … I added a dollop of beef dripping, but you could use olive oil.

Made a batter by putting 3oz of plain flour and a pinch of salt – oh, and some ground black pepper –  in a bowl, making a well in the centre, and beating in a whole egg. Then should have added 3oz of milk and 2oz of water, but the scales ran amok, so I’ve no idea what exactly I added – I just did the consistency by eyeball.

Once the sossies looked reasonably on the way to being cooked, about 20 minutes, probably, I ramped up the oven to the dizzy heights of gas 7, then poured the batter into the dish and bunged it back in for another 20 minutes or so.

We had this with the very last of the brussels sprouts I bought on Christmas Eve and HP sauce (in my case) and the last of the red cabbage (in Pete’s).  Fab on a cold snowy night.

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sausage supper

using up: polish sausage

Pete is very fond of kabanos sossidge for his luncheon, which we buy in bulk from Costco. However, the trip before last, they had no kabanos (and no Beurre Isigny either, which was a bit of a blow), so he bought a few packs of sausage from one of the Polish shops.  They weren’t nearly as nice, and some of them have languished in the fridge and need using up.

Last night, I took some of them and made a meal out of them.

Chopped one red onion three cloves of garlic, and a courgette.  Sautéd them in some olive oil (now there’s a change, dear reader!), added some chopped sage leaves and then the chunked sausage.  Added some feta to the mix at the end.

Put some macaroni in bowls, dobbed the mix on the top.  Very nice. I don’t know why people say they don’t have time to cook – this took 20 minutes start to finish,

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sausage, runner beans and stuff

Using up: runner beans, sausages

Apologies for lack of posting – we have been camping for a few days in West Wales, and we should have taken an ark rather than a tent.

I brought back three fat butcher’s sausages, and this is what I did.

Drizzled the sossidge with a little olive oil, and set them in a tray in the oven at gas 6.

Headed, tailed and sliced up the runner beans that were ten days old {mea culpa], put them in a pan with cold water, brought to the boil, and simmered for 8 minutes.

Chopped up an onion and some garlic, removed some of the sausage-y oil from their pan, added a bit more to it, and sauteéd it in a pan.  Chopped sage and rosemary from the garden, and added to the pan.

Drained the green beans, and put in about 2/3rd of them – the rest will go into a wrap with some other bits for a lunch.  Looked at it all and decided it wasn’t quite right, so opened a jar of roast yellow peppers, cut up about half, and slung them in.

Cooked some macaroni, and while that was going on, cut the sausages into 1″ chunks and put them in the frying pan.

Then macaroni and cubed feta added, with a good grate of black pepper.  It really was *delicious*.

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Belatedly, a mongrel stew

Mac mentioned the meal I cooked last Thursday; I’ve finally got round to typing up what I did. This really was reactive cooking with a vengeance: I had hardly the slightest idea what I was going to do and just let myself be guided by what ingredients were to hand, sniffing and tasting, and what passes for instinct.

Ingredients:

half Polish caraway seed sausage cut into ~1cm chunks
broad beans
courgette, chopped
large onion, roughly chopped
garlic
ginger
juniper berries
pomegranate seeds
cinnamon bark
cumin
allspice
black pepper
paprika
black mustard seeds
thyme and mint from the garden
red wine
oil

basmati rice
olive oil
some finely chopped red onion (in the absence of shallots)
pine kernels and lemon wedges

Method:

whizz ginger, garlic, cinnamon bark, juniper seeds, pomegranate seeds

grind allspice, cumin and black pepper, and add to mustard seeds and paprika in a tiny brown bowl

boil broad beans for ~10min and drain

heat oil
add dry spices and fry for a bit
add whizzed components
add onion and fry for a bit
add courgette
add sausage
cook for a bit
add slosh of red wine
simmer for a bit
add beans
cover and simmer for a while
add fresh thyme and mint
add water
simmer a while longer
uncover and reduce as appropriate before serving

the pomegranate seeds were probably a mistake done this way, as they left hard seeds in the food as served; soaking in hot water and adding later might have been better.

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