6: Sausages with salami and lentils, p29

Yuuuum! Thick snow here, and even though I'm off for nearly a month in between contracts at work, I knew T would be very cold when he got home from work and today would not be a good day to make a start on Nigel's vegetarian recipes... especially not the veggie soups... Had everything for this one to hand, except for the salami.

Sister and brother-in-law gave T a basket of lovely foodie things for Christmas, including several smelly cured sausages, but unfortunately no salami. Considered chorizo but thought it might be a bit overpowering, and in the end went with a curious smoked sausage from Austria called Kase Cabanossi - 'air dried hot smoked seasoned sausage with cheese'. Tried a bit of it before, just in case, and it's pretty good - not as spicy as salami but not as greasy either, and I've no idea what we'll do with the rest of it so might as well try it out in this recipe... and it worked very well, luckily!

Exactly as it says in the recipe, this one 'gives the impression of having been cooked for hours but is pretty much ready to eat in forty-five minutes' - I guess it's the sausages and (not-)salami which help give it a bit more weight and depth of flavour. I love sausages which have been casseroled (browned first in a frying pan), it stops them drying out or getting tough on the outside, leaving them perfectly cooked and tender, and super tasty. And T ate green lentils! He did say he didn't know they were lentils til I told him, but he still carried on eating them, and even ate the steamed cabbage-of-guilt* I'd optimistically heaped at the side of his bowl.

* cabbage-of-guilt is a technical term, and an inadvertent family tradition which I have come to recognise after years studying my family...For some inexplicable reason, those of us who do most of the cooking/food shopping (guess who they are, right?) always seem to be compelled to buy a cabbage in the weeks before Christmas. Said cabbage sits in the fridge looking enormous, green, and slightly angry, for weeks. Pre-Christmas, it's the last thing anyone wants to eat. During Christmas it's the last thing anyone wants to eat. And post-Christmas, it's absolutely definitely the last thing anyone wants to eat, especially after wading through Moz's special red cabbage... The only time any of us eat cabbage is when Moz makes her stewed red cabbage as a side for Christmas dinner, which is quite nice really but in the industrial quantities she makes it in (I think one red cabbage makes approx 2L of the stuff) combined all the other food options piled on the groaning dinner table doesn't tend to get done justice too. It's nice, it really is, it's just there's sooo much of it... and given the choice between cabbage, and more turkey and roasties, which would you pick?

So the cabbages remain in our fridges looking less angry, and more sad and unloved, and we all separately feel guilty for buying them in the first place. Why on earth did I buy that damned cabbage? We don't even like cabbage? The waste!! The waste!! This year my sister cunning booked a ski holiday at the end of the first week of January so she had to get rid of all the leftover food in the house post-Christmas/New Year - and palmed me off home with half a brie, a slab of cheddar, a chunk of emmenthal, two packs of smoked salmon, two lemons, four limes, two boxes of mince pies, 1/3 of a yule log, and one cabbage-of-guilt. We popped in to see my parents en route home. Guess what I left? I'd already got my own cabbage-of-guilt - and Moz had clearly just used hers up in a frenzy of red cabbage stewing, what was I supposed to do??

I'm sure other families do the same... it can't just be us...?