slow cooking

Easy sausage and pepper casserole

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

IMG-2273

Bert’s perfectly happy to go back to school after the Christmas break, so long as he can have another hundred years off first. I feel the same.

Today, we walked around the park with Ray, and Bert talked to me with his characteristic laconic earnestness about the problems of swimming (‘water gets up my noz-holes even when I wear my gobbles’). There is a bittersweet gorgeousness to a small child – not just in their malapropisms and bun-plump cheeks, but in the sense that they are not properly living within time yet. They sit solidly in the moment, and everything else is a hundred years away. It feels like there’s a wormhole rush of time around their stout little beings, and your future nostalgia whips you in the face as it passes at speed. It makes some moments so icily sweet that they give you brain freeze.

When we got back in, Bert put back on the pyjamas he’d reluctantly taken off to walk the dog and I put this in the oven and made cheese on toast. Bert ruminated on how cheese on toast was probably Ray’s favourite thing in the world (‘but he eats horse poo and his breath is so bad it makes my ears hurt’) and we made owls out of toilet roll middles and penguins out of Actimel bottles.

Serves 3-4

6-8 sausages

1 red pepper, sliced

1 orange pepper, sliced

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Brown the sausages in a little olive oil in a large saucepan that has a lid. Meanwhile heat the oven to 150. When the sausages are nicely coloured, add the red and orange peppers and the tinned tomatoes, swilling the tin out with water and adding maybe a quarter or a third of that to the pot. Season and bring to a fast simmer. Pop the lid on and slow cook in the oven for 3-4 hours. The sausages will be soft and tender (a winner with four-year-olds – ‘I cut it without a fork, Mum!’) and the sauce rich and sweet. You may need to ladle a little oily liquor off at the end (depends how fatty the sausages are, perhaps?). Serve with mash and corn on the cob, and a game of Bird Bingo,

Fragrant lamb tagine

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

tagine

Bert’s dad described this and the nectarine and almond cake as my ‘most competent meal’ in a while. Make of that what you will.

Served 2.5 though could happily have served 3.5

Glug olive oil

1 red onion, sliced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

500g diced lamb

3-4 carrots, chopped into chunks

1 courgette, chopped into chunks

1 tin chopped tomatoes and half the empty tin of boiled water

1 low salt stock cube

1 dessert spoon tomato puree

1 dessert spoon honey

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 teaspoon tumeric

1 teaspoon ground ginger

Pinch saffron

1/2 stick of cinnamon

Handful of dried apricots (the soft, dark brown ones), chopped

In a perfect world, you’d brown the veg and meat separately and in batches, but I don’t think it makes enough difference to the taste to be worth it, and means the whole prep here takes about 10 minutes. More time to hide remote controls and phones, and fish computer mice and batteries out of the dishwasher.

Brown the onion, garlic and lamb in the oil and then add the rest of the veg. Stir through the spices, apricots, tinned tomatoes, stock cube and water, tomato puree and honey, and season. Bring to a fast simmer then cook in a slow oven for 2-3 hours. (Mine was in the bottom of the Aga for 3 hours.) We had ours with buttered couscous and a dollop of yoghurt. Bert was initially suspicious and then chinned it. He did not eat any courgette.