Back to Jamie Oliver again this time, for a recipe from his ‘Jamies America‘, which I haven’t done that many recipes from. Lisa really like sausage stew, but I thought this gave a nice twist to it so I thought I’d give it a go.
Pictures : click to show
The usual assembly of the ingredients. The recipe called for all red peppers, but I used a mixture of red and green because that’s all I had.
Attack everything with a knife. Note the plastic bowl for all the trimmings. That was one of the key things I picked up on my Italian cookery course. Although it seems like such a simple thing, it stops you having to run back and forth to the bin all the time. If you had a compost heap you would stick it on there I guess.
First stage is to brown the sausages, which doesn’t take long. I guess you would do these in the oven, but catching all the juice that comes out of them gives you something to cook the vegetables in.
Done. Simple as that.
I took this picture because this is a sight that always made me panic when I started cooking. All the brown and crusty bits on the bottom of the pan look like something has gone wrong. But as any cook will tell you – that’s the good stuff, it’s where all the flavour is. Cooking the vegetables in the juice and fat from the sausages will capture all that flavour.
So, stick the vegetables straight in the same pan, and allow them to cook slowly to soften and absorb all the meatyness.
Then add the spices.
Once that’s all cooked in, add the tomatoes, stock and sausages to make it into a recognisable stew. Let it bubble away and thicken up into a nice thick sauce.
Serve with some rice (or potatoes I guess) and chopped spring onions on top. Easy.
This was very easy to put together, and it was very nice, although didn’t have a lot of depth for my taste – I’m not quite sure what I could do to improve that. I’ll definitely try it again, perhaps with a few more spices to give some depth.
