134: Pot-roast pigeon with luganega sausage, p307

This is days late - a) been very busy and haven't had a chance to write it up, and b) it's taken this long to get over the disastrous evening that it involved... Bad day at work, home not too late, both of us in, I decided to treat us to two Nigel recipes for dinner to destress. Hah.

I've used my Denby casserole dish on the hob many times, as in so many recipes, to brown meat / boil up ingredients with wine/stock before putting it in the oven. This time, after browning the sausages (not luganega, but the recipe says herby chipolatas are fine) and then the pigeons, and softening the onions, I added the stock, and two minutes later there was the most almighty crack from the kitchen and my lovely casserole dish had shattered on the hob into a dozen pieces, depositing two pigeons, six sausages, a chopped onion, and 500ml of hot stock all over my hob. After much swearing, the solid ingredients were chucked into my mum's old pot-roast pot and a fresh batch of stock poured in and the whole lot shoved in the oven, ignoring the 'bring to the boil on the hob first' instruction. Clearing up the stock that was everywhere wasn't quite as easy...

Unfortunately I messed up again though and giving the pigeons an extra 10-15mins on account of the lack of boiling first stage was too long and they were a bit overcooked. Rats. And they are a bit of a sod to eat, fiddly little bony things, but the herby sausages and gravy were delicious, especially with a heap of mashed potato.

Unfortunately, the disasters for the evening didn't stop there...

47: Sausage and black pudding with baked parsnips, p57

Wasn't sure about this one - black pudding is definitely not an ingredient I'd normally buy and I've never cooked with it before. It's one of those fashionable ingredients you find in posh restaurants in little nuggets alongside seared scallops, or with an assiette of pork, perhaps, so I've had it a few times and haven't disliked it, but can't say I'd particularly choooose it...

T was chuffed to bits when I got home on Friday evening and said this was what we were having - he'd found the black pudding and sausages and looked them up in the book to see what the recipe was going to be, and it appealed to his carnivorous tendencies for some reason :)

An easy peasy recipe, the only difficult bit was trying to brown everything in my big Denby casserole which was rather full and so difficult to stir, so some bits got a little browner than intended, but then only 40mins in the oven and it was done. Served with steamed sugar snap peas and homemade papika-y wedgie oven chips, the resulting casserole could have been a bit more flavoursome but that was properly down to slightly inferior ingredients - only one type of black pudding in the supermarket, and 'half fat' butchers sausages were probably a mistake. But still, quite yum, with a thick, glossy gravy from the sauce.

34: Pan-fried sausages with cream and mustard mash, p325

Yummy yummy! Nice and simple one for the end of the week, after a few days without having done any recipes - first week in new job and a lot to get done, so it's been a bit tricky. I was going to get three done yesterday as some rellies were coming round for dinner but it didn't happen in the end so it was looking like it wouldn't be a very productive week... oops.

But this was easy peasy, just bangers and mash with lots of mustard and single cream essentially, and served with some rocket, tomato, and balsamic dressing. Good Friday night comfort food.

Oh, and an interesting but slightly gross and embarrassing aside... I found a pot of single cream at the back of the fridge, unopened, but with a 'best before' of '10th Dec 2009'. Only 2 months out of date then... A sniff and a taste, by me, and by T, and it seemed fine... and indeed it was. Hmm... it was unopened, but still... 2 months??

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...?