Baked sausages and beans

There are two words that sent Danny into a fluster. “Bake” and “penne”. There is just one phrase that makes him visibly pale and narrow his dark Irish eyes.

“Pasta bake”. The reverberations that take place when I dare to mouthe these two innocent words deserve their own paragraph.

I watch with envy as families in the TV commercials tuck happily into pasta bakes. I love simple, sling in the oven and repair to a comfy chair sort of recipes. Between you and me I’m planning a baked risotto for next week but I wouldn’t dream of calling it a ‘bake’.

This recipe is one of the easiest and tastiest in my repertoire. Like the dreaded pasta bake, all the ingredients are tossed into the dish, placed in the oven and then I have 45 minutes to kick up my heels and get on with something much more indulgent.

A good client of mine introduced me to the basis of this dish – a super recipe! But I reckon that this one is better.

Of course I’ve played with the original recipe as it’s the only bake that D knowingly allows to pass his lips. He loves it and chortles every time that it’s served. And these chirrups continue until every plate and the enamel dish is scraped clean.

Recently I discovered that if you just drain the beans, rather than rinse them, and add two or three tinned tomatoes (without juice) the result is an exquisite, thickish, tasty sauce that cuts through the flouriness of the beans. So I’ve ditched my old fresh tomato twist as it has to be tinned toms every time.

Apart from the sausages this is a store cupboard recipe. We buy good sausages when they are on offer and freeze them in small packs so that we can make this recipe when we both need a bit of foodie comfort.

Frozen sausages can be unfrozen in a washing up bowl of cold water very quickly. Anchor them with a heavy weight and you can be cooking them in a couple of hours.

I’ve also started using cannellini beans – they don’t have the fuller flavour of the flageolets but their innocence begs for a little invention and this is where you can play with appetising additions. I love lots of crushed garlic, a sprinkle of home dried herbs and a good dash of chilli sherry. This combination gives the bean base a subtle vroom. What do you think? Have you got any delicious herbs/spices combinations for beans?

Baked sausages and herby garlic infused beans – for 2 greedy people in need of comfort food

Ingredients:
4-6 good sausages (depending how hungry they are)
1 400g tin of cannellini beans
2 or 3 tinned whole plum tomatoes. Squeezed gently so as not to ad too much tomato juice. The rest of the tin can be tossed into soup or frozen to add to a casserole.
4 slices of streaky bacon
1 very chunky garlic clove – squished and chopped fine (or one tsp of garlic granules)
Half a tsp of dried thyme or savory
A good dash of chilli sherry – very easy to make see here. If you haven’t yet made this essential ingredient a quarter tsp of chilli powder would do in an emergency

Method:
Drain the cannellini beans (do not rinse) and arrange them in the base of an oven proof dish. We use one of these
Add the tinned tomatoes
Add the herbs, garlic and chilli sherry and stir well
Place the sausages on top of the bean mixture and arrange the streaky bacon over the exposed beans
Baked the dish at 200c or 190 fan for 25 minutes then turn over the sausages and bake for a further 20 minutes.

Serve on warm plates and prepare to be totally satisfied with this simple comfort food. Great in the wintery weather that we’re expecting next week but also good on a chilly night in the summer too.

pigs in sty

The Chicken Lady, who writes the excellent blog Kitty’s Super Allotment, was cooking pigs’ cheeks with apples when I popped in a few weeks ago.
“I think that the butcher just sliced them off the head. Look there’s a piece of ear.”
Initially I felt a bit squirmy about tasting this dish. But these were quite delicious – the skin crispy yet soft and the meat similar to slow cooked belly of pork.

Celia from Purple Podded Peas had mentioned pigs’ cheeks to me ages ago and I’d forgotten all about them. In fact at the time I secretly thought.
“Pigs’ cheeks? Yuk. Probably similar to those rubbery pigs balls that I ate in Majorca. The latter was hailed as the Treat of all Treats as the post castration village supper. ”

Time has moved on and I’m willing to try almost anything these days.

Gliding past the Waitrose meat counter I spotted pigs’ cheeks in the forgotten cuts section. The price was £2.99 a kilo! These didn’t have skin but the price encouraged me to invest in 500g there and then.

The lady butcher shared her recipe. “I sliced a large onion and sautéed it slowly with balsamic vinegar until the onions began to caramelise. Then I put the onions and chopped pigs’ cheeks into the slow cooker. I covered them with dry cider, added sage and simmered them for about three hours.”

I had some cooking apples knocking about in the kitchen so added some of these a la TCL. Danny loathes sage so I added thyme instead. The resulting dish was sublime, melt in the mouth pork in a gorgeous, rounded sauce. This dish would feed four greedy people and could be padded out a bit with vegetables to feed more. However we enjoyed having freshly steamed veg as they balanced the richness of the dish.

Pigs’ cheeks braised in apples and cider recipe

Ingredients:
500g of pigs’ cheeks chopped into 2 cm chunks

1 large red onion, peeled and sliced

1-2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 teaspoons of Balsamic vinegar

2 heaped tablespoons of seasoned flour

1 large cooking apple or 2 medium ones (peeled and quartered)

1 teaspoon of dried thyme

Dry cider to cover

Method:
Sauté the onions gently in the olive oil for a couple of minutes and add the Balsamic vinegar. Continue to fry very gently until the onions start to caramelise.
Meanwhile cut up the pigs’ cheeks and roll them in the seasoned flour.
Peel and quarter the cooking apples.
When the onions are ready, place them in the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the apples and pigs’ cheeks on top of the onions. Cover the meat apples and onions with dry cider. Add the thyme.
Set the slow cooker to high and when the cider is bubbling turn to low and simmer for about three hours or until the pork is tender. (check after 2 hours).
Serve with mashed potatoes, carrots and peas. A glass of chilled dry cider is great with this.

Young happy pigs

If you haven’t tried curing your own bacon at home, please give it a go. It’s so easy. You will be eating superb bacon for a fraction of the cost of even the cheapest, nastiest tasting unhappy pig bacon available. 

You can also control the levels of salt – Danny has high blood pressure so commercially produced bacon is a bit of a no no. And unless you inject your bacon with preservatives, you will get no white residue to alarm you. With homemade bacon at the helm you can actually Make Friends and Influence People without having to lay out for the book.

I’m constantly playing around with recipes but not our bacon. Our standard recipe is fine but surely could be tweaked and played with too? So last week I added some light Muscavado sugar to the mix and left out the molasses. The result was exceptionally good, the taste more complex and satisfying than our standard recipe. I can’t wait to start experimenting more!

We have also discovered that leaving the bacon to soak for seven days, rather than four, the bacon tastes better and lasts longer. Both recipes are for bacon with a lower salt content than normal bacon. Once cured, it will last in the fridge for about a week or so, wrapped in a clean tea towel or grease proof paper. If you slice it and freeze it flat – one slice deep – you can cook it straight from the freezer. This would be my advice to a bacon making newbie. Make it and freeze it immediately to enjoy your bacon at its very best.

Of course, if you cure your own bacon you are taking a chance. But if you make sure that everything is scrupulously clean, that your meat is fresh and you follow the guidelines you should live to tell the tale. And what a tale that will be. We are greedy so find it hard to give our bacon away as presents but when we do people love it. On the self sufficiency front it is our gold when it comes to bartering. People proffer asparagus, home farm raised meat and so much more. A glass of Premier Cru champagne anyone? Yes, it happens regularly. Distribute your bacon, don’t ask for a swap and wait. If you are lucky you will sample other people’s gold dust too.

We tend to make streaky bacon as belly of pork is so much cheaper than lion ( for back bacon). Also streaky bacon cubed is in fact a ‘pancetta’ type of bacon and makes a great present for a serious foodie. Years ago I would never have considered using streaky bacon in a weekend fry up – now I actually prefer our grilled streaky to back bacon. ButiIf I have to buy bacon I always go for back.

In the olden days, many households kept a pig or two and cured their own bacon and ham. It was a way of preserving meat. The recipes for these use a lot of salt and saltpetre. Our recipes are different – less preserving agents (salt and sugar/molasses/black treacle) but a ‘healthier’ cure with a far shorter life.

New wet cure recipe for sweetcure back and streaky bacon
Ingredients:
1. A small 500g joint of either loin or belly of pork
2. 900ml of cold water
3. 100g of cooking salt
4. 50g of light Muscavado sugar
Method:
1. Mix the salt and sugar with the water.
2. Place the joint in the water and submerge it with a small plate. Leave to soak in the fridge for seven days.
3. Remove the joint from the curing mixture and dry with a clean tea towel. Leave the joint to chill in the fridge for an hour or so – this makes slicing easier.
4. Place the joint skin side down on a chopping board and slice.
5. Store in greaseproof paper in the fridge or slice and store in the freezer.
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