Delicious Kake Food

Sausage and Puy lentil stew. Sauté chopped onion and chopped bacon in a bit of olive oil until onion is soft. Add chopped carrots and leeks and cook for a bit longer, then deglaze the pan with a slosh of red wine.

Add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a handful of Puy lentils, and vegetable stock to cover. Season with soy sauce, black vinegar (Chinese or balsamic), and Worcestershire sauce; balance the sharpness with some jaggery (brown sugar would do).

Simmer until the lentils are nearly cooked. While this is happening, grill some sausages, let them cool enough to handle, then slice them thickly. Add the sausages to the pan and continue to simmer until the lentils are done.

Serve with sourdough bread.

I have been under the weather for the past week due to food poisoning, and I’m only just getting back to the point where I really feel like eating. Last night, bob made pork sausages, Marmite roast potatoes, steamed green beans, and anchovy gravy. Tonight I used the leftover sausages and anchovy gravy to make…

Puy lentil, spinach, and sausage stew. Cook Puy lentils in vegetable stock until done; meanwhile, fry sliced onions until nicely browned. Combine the cooked Puy lentils, the cooked onions, some frozen whole-leaf spinach, a sliced cooked sausage or two, and some anchovy gravy. Simmer down until the spinach is thawed and cooked, and the liquid is mostly gone.

You could serve this with bread or potatoes, but I just had it on its own.

Everything came from the freezer except the red pepper, parsley, olives, and Worcestershire sauce.

Puy lentil and sausage stew. Puy lentils from the freezer stash (previously cooked in bulk with onion, carrot, garlic, and tomato; portioned out and frozen), sliced previously cooked sausages from the freezer stash (if I only need a couple of cooked sausages, I cook the whole pack and freeze the rest), halved green olives, splash of Worcestershire sauce, chopped red pepper. Simmer all together with a splash of water until the pepper is cooked, then add chopped parsley.

Quinoa with preserved lemon. From the freezer, previously cooked in vegetable stock (from a bottle, Touch of Taste brand) and mixed with chopped spring onions and preserved lemons. This was left over from a large batch I cooked a few months ago.

Jollof rice. Also from the freezer, left over from the Nigerian dinner I cooked last month.

A quick, low-effort dinner tonight, based on a Stone Soup recipe.

Fry sausages in a bit of olive oil in a frying pan until brown on all sides. Pour off most of the fat. Pile the sausages up at the side of the pan, and add chopped courgette in the space cleared; sauté these until they take on a brown colour from the sausage fat. Add some pre-made tomato sauce (I used Loyd Grossman’s puttanesca) and some water, mix it all up, and let it simmer until the courgettes are almost cooked. Add pre-cooked lentils (I used Merchant Gourmet puy lentils cooked with mushrooms and thyme), mix gently, and cook for another couple of minutes to let the flavours blend. Serve with bread and/or a side salad.

I used pork sausages, but this would work with veggie sausages too; you’d just need to make sure to add more olive oil to make up for the fat that would normally come out of the sausages.

bob went to the market as usual, and then cooked dinner. I did an extra dish to go with it, a bean purée based on one I had at a Romanian restaurant the other week.

Pork sausages cooked in the oven, boiled new potatoes with mint, courgettes and garlic scapes fried up together in butter.

Borlotti bean purée was my addition; I drained and rinsed a can of borlotti beans, then simmered them in water with diced carrot, sliced leek, and thickly-sliced garlic until the vegetables were cooked. I drained this (saving the liquid to use in soup or something) and puréed it with a drizzle of olive oil, then seasoned with salt. It wasn’t quite savoury or garlicky enough, so I added garlic purée (from a tube) and some Touch of Taste vegetable stock. I’ll make this again.

We had some horseradish mustard with it too, also from the market. bob had Branston pickle, which he claims is a vegetable.

My original plan for tonight was to make a sausage, red pepper, and borlotti bean casserole using the sausages Bob got from the farmers’ market at the weekend. The sausages were quite interesting: lamb and lamb liver flavoured with orange peel and various spices. The weather today has been nice and warm, though, so the idea of casserole seemed a bit heavy.

Instead, I made some hummous and got some flatbreads out of the freezer. I chopped the red pepper finely, and mixed it with some finely-chopped tomato and spring onion, and flavoured it all with a bit of lemon juice. I squeezed the sausage meat out of the skins and fried it, breaking it up as I cooked it (inspired by this).

Then, spread some hummous on a plate, add spoonfuls of the fried meat and the pepper salad, and scoop it up with a flatbread.

Some of the pepper salad was left over: I had it for lunch a couple of days later with gnocchi.

Sausage and bean casserole. Chopped bacon, onions, carrots, and garlic sautéed in the bacon fat, then deglazed with cider. Quartered mushrooms added, sautéed a bit more. Chopped red pepper added, then more cider, some canned tomatoes, some vegetable stock, a can of mixed beans. Sausages browned separately, arranged on top and pressed down into the liquid. Cooked in the oven for 45 minutes at 180˚C, covered for the first half hour, then uncovered to cook off the rest of the liquid.

I could have served this with e.g. mash, polenta, bread, etc, but I just served it on its own.