Sausage time!

Keith’s challenge for this week is sausages.  Have to say I don’t do a lot with sausages.

Yes, we’ve the widget for our Kenwood Chef that lets us make our own (well worth the time and effort for knowing precisely what goes into your sausages – as the old Smith & Jones joke went: “Walls.  Just about the only thing not in them”) and a fantastic recipe book full of interesting sausage mixes.

Yes, we’ll take chunk of chorizo and put it into a chicken Basque (Delia Smith’s Summer Collection, page 130 – so well used that the book falls open on that page and it’s partially transparent from the cooking spatter over the years).  But then a chorizo isn’t what I call real sausage.

Near where I grew up, the little town of Masham has a fantastic butcher’s shop just off the market square.  There you could get sausages made from just about any and every animal imaginable.  These were proper sausages.  Beef, pork, rabbit, unidentified roadkill with sage and onion.  Black pudding featured as an ingredient, as did the fine local ales from both Theakston’s and Black Sheep breweries.  Cooking these sausages was never a challenge.  The challenge was getting the garlic sausages and not having everything in the fridge /house smelling & tasting of garlic for weeks afterwords.

Anyway.  My very simple recipe for sausages:

Allow 3 sausages per person minimum.  There will always be those who will eat more and those who eat less.  It balances out.  Any left-overs can be turned into sandwiches for those when-the-pub-closes munchies or just eaten cold with a good mustard.

Grill until cooked.  This usually requires the sausage to be rotated 3 times, the time between rotations getting successively shorter.

Serve with whatever the hell you like.  Mash and gravy.  Chips and brown sauce.  Honey glaze and a firey mustard.  Whatever goes down well with everyone.  You can’t really go wrong with fresh bread rolls.

And that’s about it for me and proper sausages.  Apart from one winter warmer recipe that’s a real winner in this house.  It’s on page 330 of The River Cottage Family Cookbook and is worth the price of that excellent tome all by itself (well, maybe not quite, but the book is very good).  If you haven’t got a copy, follow this link to the page on Amazon and get one soon as.

And then head over to The Recipe Shed and see what other, more imaginative, souls have done with sausages today.