Autumn is my favourite
season. Every now and then you get those really special autumn days
where the sky is bright blue, it's a little bit cold but crisp and
clear and all the leaves are changing colour. Those are the best kind
of days. My pasty white skin is more suited to jeans and boots,
jumpers, big coats, and scarves. And I get to make lovely casserole
type things, and stews, and it's the best time of year for soup.
I love soup.
Today is not one of
those special days... it's one of the other type of autumn days where
it's cold and grey and drizzly and a bit rubbish. Perfect for batch
cooking some stuff to last me the next few days at work. It'll save
me from living off ready meals and stuff with bread from the canteen.
Today's batch meal is
sausages with green lentils. The traditional recipes for this sort of thing
would use Puy lentils but I didn't have any and they're more
expensive. I do have lots of green lentils, so I used those.
Lentils go really well
with the salty/savoury flavours of pork. They're great with things
like ham hock etc. I used sausages because they're brilliant comfort
food. It's also nice to have this one pot dish with all the
vegetables included – it makes it easier to freeze portions of it
and then microwave it at work.
Ingredients:
6 good
sausages (my butcher has a decent range – choose one you like. I
got Cumberland)
200
grammes dried green lentils, rinsed
3 rashers
of smoked streaky bacon or some smoked pancetta/lardons
2 onions,
finely chopped
2 carrots,
peeled and finely chopped
3 sticks
of celery, finely chopped
3 cloves
of garlic, roughly chopped
a tin of
tomatoes
a good
glass of red wine
a pint of
chicken stock
two bay
leaves
the roughly chopped leaves of a few sprigs
of rosemary and a small handful of thyme
- Heat up some oil in a large pan and brown the sausages well, before removing them from the pan. They don't need to cook at this stage, just get a good colour on them and make the pan porky.
One of the sausages was enormous. It ended up at the front of all the photos - Slice the bacon into small pieces and fry until browned. Try not to eat them all straight out of the pan. Nothing is better than fried crispy bacon.
- Lower the heat and add the onion, carrots, celery and garlic then fry until softened. Minus the garlic, these three vegetables form the basis of most good stews/casseroles/bolognese etc.
- Add everything else to the pan, give it a good stir, season with salt and pepper. Bring it up to the boil and boil for ten minutes.
- Turn the heat down and put the sausages back in. Shove a lid on and simmer for twenty minutes to half an hour until the lentils are cooked. It depends how long they've been kicking around in the back of your cupboard. (Packets of green lentils are the kind of thing that lurk at the back of cupboards)
- Serve as is, or with some greens on the side (kale/cabbage/cavolo nero or similar) and a big dollop of dijon mustard.
Really easy, and
utterly delicious. This was supposed to be just for planning ahead,
and I was going to have risotto tonight but I couldn't resist and had
this for my tea. I'll have risotto tomorrow.
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