Time for a recipe, inspired by Giorgio OnTheTelly. This is a tasty dish and also costs about 3p to make – rather fitting for our times.
Ingredients:
- 4 sausages. You want good meaty sausages to get the best outcome for this recipe, but we found it worked just fine with supermarket own brand ones. (If you want to cook with six, then just increase all the other ingredients by 50%).
- 1 smallish carrot – chopped reasonably finely.
- 2 smallish red onions – also chopped. You can use white onion if you like – we just like the colour.
- 1 celery stick – chopped as well.
- 170g lentils – you can use fancy pants lentils if you want, we used standard supermarket own brand jobs.
- 350ml passata – normally I object to using passata and would get a (cheaper) tin of tomatoes and mush them up, but for this recipe it is worth spending the extra pennies on passata.
- 500ml vegetable stock – make your own or use a cube, whatever.
- fresh sage and fresh rosemary – from your garden, of course. Don’t be stingy with this – you want enough to taste it.
- a little olive oil for frying (or you can use butter if you like); salt, pepper.
In a casserole, heat the oil/butter over a medium high heat and fry one chopped onion (not the other one – keep that aside for a moment) with the carrot and celery until a little browned.
Then add the lentils and the stock and simmer gently for 30 minutes.
Whilst that is going on, fry the sausages in a pan until brown. Remove from the pan and keep warm.
Fry the rest of the onion until golden in a little more oil/butter. Add the passata to the onion until warmed through. Return the sausages to the pan with the herbs and cook gently for 15 minutes.
Then, add the sausage/passata mixture to the lentil/vegetable mixture in the casserole and stir.
Serve with some crusty bread. You’ll find this remarkably filling.