A Bonfire Night Casserole Creation

Ingredients
6 good quality pork sausages
2 parsnips
2 carrots
1 large or 3 small white or red onions
1/3 of butternut squash
3 eating apples
5 largeish mushrooms
25ml of stock (veg or ham if you can get it)
500g tomato passata
1 tbsp tomato puree
Pepper
Oregano
Basil
Parsley
Oil (olive, vegetable, nut - any just use your favourite)
Thickener - Potato startch thickener (This is OPTIONAL)

Utensils
Cooker
Chopping board
Bowl
Measuring jug
Sharp knife
Peeler
Frying pan
Casserole dish or slow cooker
Wooden spoon
Slotted spoon
Fork or tongs

God that seems like a really long list doesn't it? This meal can easily serve 4-6 people and is not expensive. It can easily be made veggie too, just omit the pork sausages and use veggie stock. Right now on to the how to make. I have tried to make this as easy as possible but I would appreciate any feed back.

1. Peel the carrots, parsnips, onions, apples and butter nut squash. Top and tail the onions and carrots, core the apple and then chop everything into pieces about 1cm in size cubed. It doesn't matter if it is perfect or not, thereabouts will do. Put the onion into the frying pan.

Put all the other chopped veg into a bowl and set aside.

2. Chop the mushrooms into quarters, if very large cut them into six instead. Put into the frying pan with the onion.

3. Put on the cooker onto a medium heat. On an electric cooker this is between 3-4 and on a gas cooker this is when the flame is just touching the bottom of the pan. Put about a table spoon of oil into the frying pan with the mushrooms and onions and put on the heat. Stir them occassionally as they cook with the wooden spoon.

Cook until the onions are just beginning to soften slightly then place into the casserole dish. This should only take about 4-8 minutes depending on your cooker.

4. Put another tablespoon of oil in the frying pan and return it to the heat. Put in half of the other vegetables and stir them occasionally as they cook.
 

Leave them to cook for 5 minutes then place in the casserole dish. Repeat this with the second half of the veg.

5. Add a little more oil to the pan if you think it needs it. If your sausages are very fatty you wont need any oil but if they are good quality and lean then they will need a little oil so they wont stick. Poke each sausage with a fork or a knife before you place them in the pan so they don't explode.

Place the sausages in the pan and turn occasionally until browned on each side. They don't need to be cooked through, just browned.

6. At this point preheat your oven to 200 degrees celcius/400 fahreheit on electric or gas mark 6.

7. Take the browned sausages from the pan and place in the casserole dish. Pour the passata into the pan with the juices from the sausages and add the 25ml of stock. The stock can be a cube or a jelly added to water or a fresh or liquid stock. Stir the stock and passata together over the heat. Once it starts to simmer gently then add the herbs and pepper to taste.

Stir in the tomato puree. If you wish to add thickener then add it at this point and stir in thoroughly.

8. Pour the sauce over the veg and the sausages in the casserole dish.

Place your casserole dish in the oven and cook for 30 minutes turning the sausages over half way through cooking. In the mean time prepare any sides you want to accompany it.

9. Serve your casserole with sides of your choice. We had ours with baked potatos and sprouts. When you take it out of the oven it should be browned on top slightly. If it burns slightly just turn the burnt bits into the sauce and it should maybe be ok. Serve it with a slotted spoon as that is probably easiest.

You can mess around with this recipe as much as you like. You could add worcester sauce to the sauce mix, you could use different herbs, you could do anything you wanted with it. You could add any variety of veg in any amounts and as I said before it is so easy to make this a veggie dish. I hope you guys enjoy it if you make it. Remember if you have any left over you can always freeze it and have it for lunch or dinner another day. This is a really easy recipe for a slow cooker too. Just cook on high for 2 hours or low for 6 and done :)

Enjoy!

P.S. Our cat, Jim, waited patiently for dinner to be cooked.

So much so he fell asleep half way through the cooking and didn't wake up until it was eaten!

Introduction

My name is Sarah Anne and I have been obsessed with cooking from a very young age. I didn't however go on to study cooking in any professional context. Instead I experiment and feed the results to myself, my husband and various friends who volunteer to be guinea pigs. Mostly the food I invent comes out pretty good and so I decided to make this blog to share my unusual creations with people.

Let me tell you a little more about me. I grew up in Liverpool, England to an Irish family and therefore food has had a very significant impact on my existance. We were not a wealthy family when I was growing up, I was the youngest of five, but we ate well mostly because of my parents versitility and ingenuity. The cheapest of foods was always transformed into something wonderful on my parents table. A multitude of things which other families would buy preprepared we would make ourselves. This served as an early food education to me. From a young age I would hang around in the kitchen with my family. Meals where big events in our family, dinner in the evening was a chance for us all to stop and talk to each other about what we had done that day. The making of food was also the centre of our family - home made christmas and birthday cakes, home made treats, home cooked dinners. So from the time where the only thing I could do in a kitchen was hit a pan with a wooden spoon till now has been an education for me as much as my university film degree was.

At university cooking was a way for me to destress and also make friends. I also taught a good number of people basic cooking skills who where completely unprepared for self catered university living accomodation. I also cooked budget roast dinners for my flatmates and it a great social occasion. We also held various things like ice cream parties. This was also where I learnt to make my own food creations out of necessity. Some of them where the most unlikely creations made simply because I had to feed myself out of the things I found at the back of the freezer or fridge and cupboards at the end of term when money was tight. These creations have odd names because I am not so great at naming things but each and everyone has been tested and found tasty.

I also found my husband at university, and my cat, my lizard and my hampster. My husband and I still live on a tight budget and still odd food creations are made. Therefore there are many new recipies all the time for us to tell the world about. So hopefully you will enjoy the recipies I post and also the ideas and discussion and even the little rants that may come up time to time. :)