A Winter Warmer

I’ve been cooking on a daily basis for 20 years or so, like a lot of men, when I first had to fend for myself, I ate out a lot. I ate a lot of takeaways and ready meals, but you can only live on crap for so long before you yearn for proper food. In the beginning I relied upon recipes, as you do. The problem here is, the people who write cook books don’t use recipes, and rarely cook anything in small quantities, let alone weigh or measure stuff, therefore the recipes are guesstimates, and do they actually test each one?

Recipes are for people who don’t know how to cook, experience gives you the confidence to proportion stuff and cook by eye and taste and texture. So, here’s a dish we like.

Sausage Casserole

Cook off 36 good sausages (life’s too short for poor sausages) a good variety of your choice; I do ‘em in the oven.

Using  a ratio of sausage to chorizo of about 5/1 slice and fry off chorizo dulce, use picante if you like your head blown off. Chorizo oozes red fat, this is colour and flavour, don’t throw, put the fried chorizo to one side and pour the fat into a large pot. Into the large pot goes a diced medium swede, a couple of fat diced parsnips, a bunch of diced carrots and a large diced onion. Fry off and stir in a dsp of plain flour, then add 4 cans off chopped tomato, then add 2 litres of tomato juice, add the chorizo then throw the pot in the oven for 2-3 hrs. till the veg is soft. The cooked sausages are then added, allow to cool and portion up, at 3 sausages a portion 12 portions to freeze. We like this one with a jacket potato and a bit of green veg.