Meat Cooking for the Faint Hearted #6 - Bacon and Beans

This is the kind of warming dish I've wanted to try out on/for the Chap for a while now.  I finally made it prompted by my bargain purchase of 3 tins of cannellini beans for 99p at a newly opened 99p store close to

Flanked by some other bargains.
2 packs of the tuna fillets - 99p and
garlic salad 99p.  :-)

us.  This makes it tick the 'frugal' box and the usage of whatever veg you have in that needs using up makes it even better as a cheap meal.
I did a little scooting about on the t'internet and came up with the below; mostly influenced by and adapted from this recipe.

Bacon and White Beans
Lump bacon - you can get cheap mis-shape packs in S'burys and butchers.  (I forgot to weigh how much I used but you can use rashers instead, as much or as little as you like / your pocket dictates.)
1-2 cloves garlic (to taste)
1 small onion / half a whopper (that's what I had)
1 carrot (or a stick of celery or both)
1 can beans - drained and rinsed (I used cannellini but white beans of your choice will do)
250ml stock (I used veg, you could use chicken if you have it)
Black pepper
Sprig Rosemary
1 bay leaf

Chop the bacon into lardons or leave whole if using rashers and chop after cooking.  Fry off the bacon in a heavy based pan - I used my cast iron one person sized casserole.  Fry until crispy then remove but leave the fat in the pan.
Add the sliced and rough chopped onion, minced garlic and the diced carrot and cook for a few minutes until softened.  (I used carrot as I didn't have any celery in the house but use both or either or neither -it's not a real picky recipe.)
Add the beans and bacon and cook for a couple of minutes whilst you nip outside and get the herbs - these are mine by the front door.  Or use dried of course.  :-)
Scrunch up the bay leaf a little and chop the rosemary finely if using fresh.  Add to the pan with plenty of freshly ground black pepper.
Add the stock, stir well and whack up the heat to bring to the boil.  [At this point I realised I forgot the garlic so chucked in a good half teaspoon of garlic granules instead.  Doh!]

Reduce the heat and simmer covered for half an hour, stirring occasionally.  Then uncover and simmer for up to a further 30 minutes stirring more often to ensure it doesn't catch on the bottom.  It may not need the full 30 but do it for as long as it takes to get to a nice sticky consistency.  Adjust this to your preference, leave it more soupy if you like, everything's well cooked by now.
Serve with some fresh greens on the side and watch the Chap wolf it down - he professed it to be lovely and ate the lot at one sitting!  :-)

I had to entrust the Chap with taking this shot but to be fair, this kind of meal is never going to win any 'pretty' awards!

Random Recipe - Meat Cooking for the Faint Hearted #5 - Roasted Leg of Rabbit with Bacon and a Mustard Sauce Gravy

This month's Random Recipe challenge as set by Dom over at Belleau Kitchen was to use our birth date number to count books from one end of your cook book shelf to pick a book, then to pick a recipe at random from said book.  My birthday is on the 22nd so we were going to end up midways into the shelf somewhere.  Apparently it didn't matter which end you counted from; as Dom had gone right to left I did the same and ended up with.... Oh - one of only 2 books (at the time, he's had a birthday since) on the shelf that belong to the Chap not me.  Huh - oh well.  An extra layer of randomness.  (Out of interest at this point we both counted from the other end too and we ended up with the second of his 2 books.  Huh again.)  Anyway the book was (drum roll please) - Simon Hopkinson's 'Roast Chicken and Other Stories'.  This was in fact a gift to him from my big sis last chrimble and I'm not sure we've made anything from it yet.  It proudly boasts  it's 'the most useful cookbook of all time' as voted by 'Waitrose Food Illustrated' on the front cover.  Reeeeaaaalllly.....

So - I gave the Chap the task of opening it at random to find me a recipe.  Then I could blame him of course.  Not stupid me.  ;-)  The page is... ah - small hiccup.  It's the page describing (wittering on about) garlic.  No recipe here on either side.  Try again good chap, try again, we cry.  As the pages stop fluttering past I get a little jump of excitement - it says crab - one of my favourite things!!  Woop!!  Oh - it's just another 2 pages wittering with no recipes.  Huh.  So- third time lucky and.... well, presumably you've read the title and that is indeed what he managed to pick for me the swine.  Page 174 gives you 'Roasted leg of Rabbit with Bacon and a Mustard Sauce'.  Hmmm.  Now I know I've eaten rabbit at some point as a nipper but I sure as hell have never ever cooked it myself.  Oh well - that's why we trust the recipe right - they'll lead us gently by the hand right?
First things first.  Reading the recipe immediately apprises you of Mr Hopkinson's somewhat didactic style.  You should use French Farmed rabbit he decries.  "A wild rabbit will not do" he sweepingly states.  Well tough boyo cos that's what I can get I'm afraid.  This book was first published back in 1994 so perhaps you could nip into your 'enterprising' butchers (his phrase) back then and buy a) just legs and b) specify that they are not only French but farmed none the less.  I'm not entirely convinced you could unless it was just at the 'enterprising' (read 'hideously brow-beaten') butcher that had the misfortune to ply his wares nearest Hopkinson's casă but no matter - I'm getting my rabbit - legs plus rest of body attached - from a local butchers here in Exeter.  They do rabbits at £2.99 each or 2 for £5.  For some reason I bought 2 - I can't help it when it's better value.  All those HFW programmes telling me it's a great frugal meat with the best free range existence (true for my wild examples) were obviously shouting strong in my subconcious when I was discharging my rabbit purchasing duties.  Not sure it was a good idea but hey ho.  Anyway - I digress.
So - having failed entirely to buy just legs I now needed to detach the desired appendages before I could start on the damn recipe itself.  (Are you picking up that this experience was no picnic??)  Google to the rescue - gave me this page from the Guardian.  Looking at the picture it appears I'll learn how to detach the wings from my skinned little bunny angel.  I would point out the pic is 'upside down' (to our head uppermost conventions of thinking) in that those 'wings' are in fact the back legs - the bits I wanted.  I also however needed to do most of the rest of the instructions so the rest of flopsy could be put to good use feeding Chap and, worst come to the worst, Zeke.  So, not just meat cooking for the faint hearted but a crash course in bunny butchery.  Thanks Chap, your veggie/pescatarian girlfriend thanks you.  No really...
At this point I will let you know that's there're bunny butchery pics coming up.  If you, dear reader, eat meat and flinch at confronting these I shall be most disappointed.  That was me hacking bits off it so if I can manage that....  [High horse gives up and throws Ruth off in disgust.  'Don't woo the readers by lecturing them' he neighs.  Maybe.  Or maybe I just need more sleep.  Whatever.]  And yes - I will get to the recipe at some point.  Honest.
Lay bunny out.  Flopsy has innards still intact.  Blimmin brilliant.  Extract innards.  Marvel at the ickle kidneys.  Be secretly disappointed when Chap refuses your kind offer of devilled ickly bunny kidneys and insists on 'gifting' them to Zeke instead.  Huh.
Remove legs as per Guardian instructions.  (The rib cage bit was a nightmare but I'll spare you.) 
We can now finally join the recipe I'm supposed to be cooking and writing up.  Longwinded - moi??! 
You can find the recipe online here, albeit in an americanised version.  I'm reluctant to copy the entire thing out as it's not mine to do so with, so I'll give you the edited highlights.
Preheat oven to 220c / gas 7. 
Mr Hopkinson's next instruction is to remove the thigh bone from the leg and is, I guess, calculated to reassure; stating as he does "This is only slightly tricky." 
Totally correct. 
What he omits to mention is the essential and much more fiendishly awkward next step of detaching said thigh bone from the lower leg bone in order to remove it from the thigh totally. 
The joint is very tight and I eventually had to stick the point of my knife in the very small centre section and force the joint apart at the same time as getting through the tendons.  This Flopsy has spent his life jumping and racing around outside therefore the tendons joining indiviual rear legs bones together are strong.  However, perserverence gets us there albeit with a renewed and lower opinion of Mr Hopkinson.
At this point I will fess up to having 'adapted' (messed up on) some of the ingredients for this dish.  The recipe calls for fresh tarragon which I hadn't got so I had already resigned myself to using dried. 
I was however smugly secure that we had a whacking great bunch of fresh thyme available to use; the other fresh herb the recipe calls for.  Err - where was that then?  Says Parsley here?  Got any of that have you?  At 5pm on a Sunday?  We'll use the dried Parsley as well then yes?  Oops.
After which the fact that I had back bacon instead of streaky seemed a minor point.  I know the purpose of the streaky is to ensure the naturally very lean meat of the rabbit stays moist by utilising the pork fat but the Chap hates fat on meat and trims it off back bacon so would not touch anything wrapped in streaky.  He was the one eating it after all so I let him have that one.
Mix butter, garlic, [dried] parsley and tarragon and the zest of a lemon (or half - I halved the entire recipe) together with S+P and stuff the leg cavities with it.
Grease a baking tray.
Wrap the legs with bacon ensuring the rasher ends are on the underside, thus keeping them secure in the cooking process.
Roast for 10 minutes then remove and rest for another 10.

At this point myself and the recipe parted ways; with I the adventurer in the uncharted random waters of attempting to make a mustard sauce intended to be composed from cream and Dijon out of; erm, no cream (gone off after defrosting - see last post) and (I'm ashamed to admit this so will do so in a small voice in the hope that you won't notice it flashing past and won't therefore laugh too uproariously at me) a single sachet of Heinz French mustard.  Oops doesn't really cover that one eh?* 
I tried using a little spoon of yogurt and a dash of milk instead of cream but after tasting it both the Chap and I unanimously voted it 'minging' and it was ditched.  Given the Chap's fat phobia he wasn't too happy about the idea of the cream sauce anyway so I made him a nice gravy by boiling flopsy's rib cage with a bay leaf, garlic, onion, carrot trimmings, etc instead; added some veggie granules and  mashed a couple of roasted garlic cloves in.  Job done.  I served it vaguely à la Hopkinson; cutting the prescribed 3 slices from the bulbous end of the leg and standing the bony end next to it but really went for the massive fail by not serving it with the 'suggested' (an unaccustomed laxing of the preceding levels of didactic pedantry) dish of plain boiled potatoes and green salad but instead providing Chap with a full on roast.  Which isn't in this photo as that would just be far too messy and detract from my fantastic (sarcasm) presentation; natch.

So - a random recipe that had me hands deep in dead bunny, attempting butchery for the first time ever and (sorry Waitrose Food Illustrated) starting to really not rate Mr Hopkinson's usefulness at all.  It was - an experience.  However - Chap did declare the legs delicious to eat so I guess the recipe's not all bad.  Though if he thinks I'm making it again in a hurry he can damn well find me one of these 'enterprising' butchers I've heard so much about that'll sell me just the legs of flopsy...
*In my defence I would like to point out that we usually have Dijon, Whole Grain and English mustard in but I have a Chap that will happily slather half a jar of mustard on his beef joint before roasting it then eat it with the other half of the jar.  Means we sometimes unexpectedly run out of mustard mmkay?

Meat cooking for the faint hearted #4 - Chinese Roast Chicken - w' oyster sauce and honey no less!!

After a slack section in my blogging recently I am returning with - what's this?  A meat recipe??!!  Yes - sorry m'dears but I figured it was a post I could hopefully write up fairly quickly as there's not masses to the recipe.
I get oodles of emails along the lines of 'visit our sparkly website and buy our shizzle' as I am in the habit of signing up for all the freebies I can find left, right and centre which invariably means giving them an email address in return.  Still - if you want free stuff (and after all - there's enough free providers of email addys out there that you can set one up specifically for this kind of sign up) I don't see the issue.  Sometimes you even get something that interests you pop into your in-box.  Hence this recipe which came from the Chinese food company Lee Kum Kee as part of their suggestions for mother's day.  It's easy, the ingredients aren't massively expensive; the chicken forms most of it but do get a decent welfare one and make sure you get your soy sauce from a Chinese supermarket - this recipe does us half a litre of the stuff!!  Most importantly for the beloved meat eater in your life it is; according to the Chap, most yum indeed.  [I'm fairly sure as a burly builder type he didn't utter those actual words - but don't you wish he had?!  That was certainly the sentiment he expressed anyway.]
Here goes then:

Chinese Roast Chicken with Honey and Oyster sauce  [I've linked the original recipe here but as it's listed under the mother's day options I'm unsure how long it'll stay on their site so I'm putting it here too - I figure me mentioning the company a few times over the course of this post is fair exchange for promoting their recipe don't you?  Especially as said recipe was on the web for purposes of monetary gain in the first place.]
1 chicken - approx 1.5 kg in weight
500ml soy sauce
2 fat cloves garlic - minced
1.5l water

10 'slices' ginger - don't ask me what this measurement is - I guess depends how much you like ginger.  I peeled a bit of root and did lengthwise slices of the section.
4 star anise
100g Oyster sauce
60+ ml honey - the recipe says 1/4 cup which is 62.5 ml.  Use 4 tbsp and you won't be far wrong.

The more observant of you may have noticed that the last 2 ingredients are in a diff colour - they are the 'glazing' ingredients.  The rest are the 'seasoning mix'  - boiling ingredients.

 
Put all the boiling ingredients (bar the chicken) in a pan large enough to hold them all and the chicken and bring to the boil.  Carefully manoeuvre your chicken into the mix [I declined to just 'drop' it in as the recipe said - fearing a soy sauce splash back incident!], cover and reduce the heat to a simmer.  Simmer for 30 minutes.

Put oven on to heat at 160.  Mix together the glaze ingredients of oyster sauce and honey.  As it turned out both the soy sauce I already had and the oyster sauce I purchased for this recipe from my local Chinese supermarket were the Lee Kum Kee people's products but any would do I'm sure.  The honey I used was just S'burys basics stuff - perfectly good enough for cooking and baking with I find.
Carefully remove your chicken from the water - at this point I realised that perhaps you're supposed to leave the damn thing trussed up as it comes in the packaging rather than carefully snipping through it's ties before boiling the thing as I did.  Legs and wings were flopping about everywhere I tell you!* 
Lay in a baking tray and pour the glaze over ensuring evenly covered as much as possible.  It does all slide off into the tray as it warms though.  The recipe suggested uing a brush here - I didn't bother as I found spooning it over and spreading it with the back of the spoon was adequate without having to thoroughly gunge up my pastry brush.

Cook for 30 - 45 mins (the recipe says) - I did 45 mins basting with the glaze every 15 mins.  Check the chicken is cooked through properly usng the old 'juices run clear' technique.
Serve.  Apparently this was authentically like the 'Chinese' chicken bits you can get pre-done in the shops and was thoroughly enjoyed by the Chap.  It's a low prep recipe so easy to do with little time having to be spent watching over it.
* [This bit did make me a bit uncomfortable - the whole 'recognisable shape' thing I guess that did a good job at eroding the distancing I use when cooking meat for The Chap.  It was the way the limbs moved - far too easy to see the form of the hen it once was bounding about a yard somewhere.]

Meat Cooking for the Faint Hearted #3 - Roast Chicken

It being cold and miserable and generally grim I thought I'd treat the Chap to a nice roasted chicken dinner when he got home from work on Monday.  Having text him about it and got the boy all excited I realised I have zero idea how to do roast chicken.  Despite reading many and varied cookery books and recipe websites over the years I tend not to retain the details of the meat recipes so much, not eating it myself.  So - how do you roast chicken?  Answer - google it.  :-)  Top results are Jamie, Delia, BBC &c &c.  I'm afraid I don't tend to go for Delia's recipes very often as I dislike her needlessly didactic tone so I checked out the Jamie Oliver and the BBC effort as well as a handy page here which deals with the entire process including weight vs cooking time tables.  I settled for Jamie's recipe in the end as it sounded tasty with the lemon and herbs but pretty straightforward with a minimum of faffing about - just what I wanted after a long day at work.
So - roast chicken.  First buy your chicken.  Depends on budget whether you'll go for an organic or free range but at the very least please get a 'higher welfare' bird.  From watching various stuff like Hugh's Chicken Out campaign &c I've heard that the free range and/or organic birds taste better - a more concentrated 'chickeny' flavour so I guess you can get that bit more out of them in terms of stock, leftovers etc.  The next decision is size - the Jamie recipe quotes for 4 people but I was cooking for 1; albeit 1 large appetited Chap.  So - I thought I'd look for a smaller size chicken.  Pointless!  In the stupormarket they had large - deffo too big, then medium and small sizes.  The medium were about 1.4 - 1.5 kilos - the recipe seemed to be for 1.6kg bird.  The smaller birds were anything from 1 kilo to 1.2 but were only about 20p cheaper than a medium size!  A no-brainer so I went for the medium.  First hurdle out of the way.  (You may be wondering at this juncture why I feel the need to chronicle my chicken buying exploits in quite such detail but as a non-meat eater who went veggie before she learnt most of her cooking; buying meat is not something I'm familiar with at all, nor confident about.  So - I'll share with you guys and maybe help a fellow 'faint hearted meat cooker' or more likely - you can tell me how to do it properly. :-D )

Ingredients as used by me:
1 chicken
2 red onions
1 parsnip
2 carrots
Approx 3" section butternut squash  - from the narrower neck end
About 4/5 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
Sprig rosemary
Olive oil
S+P
1 lemon

Home then and after sticking the oven on at 240 - top temp - I peeled the veg (except the garlic which also stays whole) and scraped the carrots as they were looking a little tired and sorry for themselves.  Chopped them into chunks and piled on the baking tray and drizzled with oil as per Mr Oliver's instructions.  Well - I say drizzled - kinda had a bit of a gushing out moment so there was a bit more oil than I intended.  My little big sis has greatly recommended an oil drizzler to me for moments like these - given that she is the least domesticated person I know I'm not sure how she knows this but perhaps I should suggest it as a suitable chrimble item.
Righto - using the tips from the 'help with cooking' site linked above I made sure to wash the chicken - inside and out - then dabbed dry with a kitchen towel.  Apparently this helps get a nice crispy skin.  As my chicken was tied up and Jamie's recipe didn't specify I chose to untie it as the tips site seemed to think this could help it cook more evenly. 
I sploshed some oil on and rubbed it in then realised my obvious error and had to ask the Chap to grind on the S+P for me to then rub in.  After a good washing of the hands I duly stabbed my lemon and microwaved it on a plate for 30 seconds as recommended to bring the flavour out.  Insert herbs and lemon inside chicken - possibly whilst averting your gaze as this really is a bit 'ick'.  Plant bird firmly atop your veg and bang it in the oven - turning this down to 200 at the same time.

Cook for 1 hour 20mins, basting half way through.  Basting means getting the whole lot out and spooning the juices that have come out of the chicken back over it to help prevent it from drying out.
Remove chicken and put on board - cover with foil then a tea towel (don't ask me why - it's what Jamie says to do so I duly did) and leave to rest for 15 minutes.  His recipe then helpfully says: 'Now is the time to make your gravy' without offering the slightest hint how you go about this.  Well - in my house I'm afraid gravy comes from veggie granules; generally Aldi's own so I made some of these up a little bit thicker than usual and left some room in the jug.
I poured off the juices from the meat tray into a mug and stuck it in the freezer - the Chap does this when he's had roast beef so the fat solidifies and can be removed easily leaving the stuff with the meat flavour in it that you then add to the gravy.  This fat didn't really solidify, quite possibly because a) it didn't have enough time and b) there was a fair bit of olive oil in it but we managed to pour it off and added the meaty juices left to the chaps gravy jug.

I then carved (first time ever!) as per Jamie's instructions - quite easy once I worked out where the leg joint was he mentions.  And ta - daa!!  Roast chicken all by my own fair hand!

First week of term means week of mentalness for me.  We book 'em in, we test 'em and then we register them with nary a hiccup on the way.  Which if believed by your fine selves does somewhat lead me to the conclusion that I could tell you any fib I wanted and be similarly believed.  ;-)
It does mean I've failed to get a post on for which I apologise but here are a few things I have managed to do.
Admired the misty mornings before enjoying the late sunshine - this was my journey to work on wednesday.

Made the Chap a full mixed grill - truly heroic meat cooking by the faint hearted I reckon!  He had local west country fillet steak, boneless lamb shoulder 'lump' (steak / chop / er...?), honey roast pork chipolatas and a duck leg.  All the trimmings bar onion and he said don't worry about that - there was no more room on the plate!

I have also enjoyed my beautiful flowers the Chap got me last week opening up and the scent of lilies that greets me each day on my return home.  Ahhh...  Happy Friday all!

Meat Cooking for the faint hearted #2 - Ox Liver and 'Bacon' hotpot

Except it was leftover roast gammon not bacon.  Chap had done the roasting the previous Sunday and had smothered the half joint [another pre-easter CFC bargain at £2 instead of a tenner - I couldn't believe it when I saw that that's how much what is effectively a big lump of ham costs normally!  What a rip off.] in English mustard and I think; a wee bit of honey.  I'll have to check that detail with him. - Yep - honey
The Ox liver was also a CFC clogging-up-my-freezer-space meaty bargain at something like 40p so I took the opportunity to combine some leftovers with the frugal liver to create a hopefully tasty dish for t'Chap [who had ended up getting sent off to Plymouth for work meaning he would be back rather later than usual] and reclaim some of the freezer space for veg stuff.

This was loosely based on a recipe I found here, after googling Ox liver.  Top pointers seem to be that it's the toughest of the livers available therefore needing a long slow cooking method, but is also the 'tastiest' - should you like the taste of liver.  Bleargh.  Even back in my meat eating days I detested liver so this was going to be an interesting cooking experience!

Ox liver & Gammon Hotpot

1lb Ox liver

2 sml / 1 lg onion - sliced
1 md carrot - chunked
1 lg / 2 sml sticks celery - chunked
4-5 big (but not the flat field type) mushrooms - chunked
2-4oz gammon in little chunks
1 heaped tbsp seasoned flour

Parsley

Thyme
S+P
Stock
Potatoes - sliced

Put oven on to heat at gas 3 - or if it's my oven which I know is shite at low temps use 3.5-4.

Slice the liver and toss in the seasoned flour.  Ha - damn sight easier said than done.  Liver is damn messy - muchos blood, not pleasant at all.  In fact it's pretty damn manky I'm afraid.  If you're a veggie that's squeamish don't do liver is my advice!  Anyway - having sliced the [literally] bloody stuff next comes the flouring - I feel I may have done this bit slightly wrong.  I dumped the flour on top of the liver and stirred.  This gave me a passable imitation of lumpy concrete in a fetching [NOT] pink shade.  Hmmm - promising thus far then!

Place your gooey icky pink mix in the bottom of the casserole - oh sorry - that should read 'lay the liver in the base of the casseole'  lol. 

Mix the veg and gammon together and put over the top.
Sprinkle the herbs over [the recipe said sage and of course the day before making this was when I moved the pot of sage from outside the front door to down the allotment so I used what I had] followed by S+P. 
Pour stock over until just on/over the top of the veg.
Top with thin slices of potato arranged in a pretty pattern- or chucked on any old how - it doesn't really matter and depends how much time you wish to dedicate to aesthetics.

Put lid on and whack it in the oven for 3.5 hours then uncover for another half hour to crisp the top.

That's it.  Apart from the whole unexpectedly large amount of blood and the flouring bit it actually wasn't too bad - chopping veg is kinda second nature and it's a dish you just bang in the oven and walk away from rather than one you have to hover over constantly.

Chap enjoyed it but did mention he'd have liked some tomato flavours in there.  It had crossed my mind to add a good tbsp or 2 squirt of tom puree to the stock - esp. as I was using veg stock cubes not having beef ones in the house and evidently they aren't going to have the same flavours or depth of flavour for a meat based dish.  This being the first time I made this though - or any liver dish in fact I was wary of tweaking it so didn't.  Hey ho - I know for next time.

My verdict - it didn't seem that exciting a dish when made to me - perhaps mixing the meat and veg more as well as the addition of the aforementioned tom flavour would work better.  Also - I need to work on my 'flouring the meat' technique I think!  :-D  Not bad for a first timers offal effort though.

Meat cooking for the faint hearted #1 - Slow Cooker Sos

Don't fret - I haven't fallen off any wagon and am still a non-eater of meat [although I am an eater of fish making me a pescatarian not a true veggie.]  The Chap is however an eater of meat and it struck me that apart from bacon or a steak I really know naff all about cooking actual meat dishes.  Granted I could probably muddle my way through a roast with the help of instructions on the back of the label but it's not something I know - which irks me somewhat considering how much I like cooking.  I went nearly all veg at 16/17ish so before I really started cooking for myself, only returning to eating fish at uni.  [Prawns were the only thing I never gave up - one Marks & Spencer Prawn and Mayo sarnie a month kept me on the straight and narrow the rest of the time.]  Not having eaten the stuff for so long whilst I learnt most of my basic cooking skills means there's a distinct lack of meat dishes in my repertoire.
This is all kicked off due to the Chaps rather good haul of CFC bargains from the Co-op the day before they were shut for easter.  He got a plethora of sausages, ox liver, lambs liver, diced beef as well as a gammon joint and a couple of big rump steaks.  Nearly all of it ended up in my freezer and when it started to become impossible to fit my frozen sweetcorn in I decided it was time I did something about it and cooked some of the damn stuff for him.  First up then was a basic sausage [sos / snag / banger - you're choice of colloquialism] casserole.  Long ago I'd kept a recipe from a jar of sauce of some kind and this then was my basis for this slow cooker dish adapted to fit the ingredients to hand.

4 sos - ours were Lincolnshire ones [whatever that signifies - I'm afraid the niceties of that side of it are a bit of a closed book to me]

1 red and 1 white onion - it's what I had - or use 1 large white one etc, chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped / minced
EVOO
Mushrooms, chopped (3ish)
Tin chopped toms
0.5pt veg stock
White wine
Red lentils - 2 wee scoops - which was 6 tbsp
1tsp dried thyme
1tsp smoked paprika
Small handful greens - spinach / chard / sea beet / whatever you have to hand

Cook the sausages a bit - to help them keep their shape in the SC.
Heat the EVOO and add the onion and garlic.  Fry gently to soften.
Add the mushrooms and cover then cook gently a few minutes more.  Tip the lot into the SC and whack it on High to heat up.
Add the toms and juice from the tin, a splosh of white wine and the stock; made with boiling water as this will help the ingredients get up to heat faster.
Add the lentils and the thyme and paprika and stir all together.  Judge the amount of liquid in there; the lentils will swell so if necessary add a little more wine and/or stock to ensure there's enough to cook them in.
Chop the sos into inch-ish long chunks and add to the SC.
Cover and turn to medium or low depending how long you've got.  Mine ended up having rather longer than needed with 6 hours but it won't harm it.  Just make sure the lentils are properly cooked through.
Stir your greens in and re-cover to let wilt for a few mins before serving.

See - it's easy!! Admittedly using a pre-formed thing like a sausage seems a wee bit cheaty but it was what we had to hand after the CFC sweep bargain night - these cost us 40p a pack of 8 making this a deffo tick in the 'frugal' box.  They seemed quite 'solid' sausages - not too spongy - actually containing some meat!  Which I think will have helped them keep their form in the SC.  Otherwise the chap enjoyed it and I can [just about] claim that I can make sos casserole.  Kind of...  ;-)