Although the sun had shone a lot during the walk, the rain had arrived in miniature monsoons that bathed the leaves on the trees bordering the old railway tracks and parkland that the walk took in. This meant despite the time of year I knew that a good quality soup with plenty of body was in order.
Having already had some Game Soup as a starter prior to my carvery I concluded that a similarly substantial soup was needed for tea. I decided the make a sausage soup using a batch left over from a recent indoor barbeque.
The playlist for this weekend was an eclectic mix of mainly and/or introspective music and included Scott Walker (both the avant garde version and the easy listening version), ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead, Suede, R.E.M and at the time I was preparing the soup, Roy Harper. Harper is man who is his own genre as nobody has quite combined the worlds of progressive and folk music in the way he can. The two albums of his that followed each other on the playlist at this time were 1992's Death or Glory and 1988's Garden of Uranium. The former was a fighting response to his partner of some years running off with someone else and includes the track "Miles Remains" a reflective acoustic piece with a soaring quality that is one of the best tributes out there to late Jazz Giant Miles Davis. Garden of Uranium meanwhile is a worthy effort too despite having some songs undercut by synths that although appealing for nostalgic value to a child of the 80's like me, were probably a touch disconcerting for the fans who had been following the great man since he started out in the 1960s.
The Le Cresceut was back in action for today's dish and I started by slicing up finely four carrots, a white onion, two sticks of celery and two cloves of garlic. I added these to the Le Cresceut with some sunflower oil and three ounces of dried parsley. I stirred the ingredients well and put the lid on the Le Cresceut before cooking the contents of it on the hob on a medium heat for around twenty minutes while stirring the food occasionally to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the dish.
While the vegetables were cooking I prepared the sausages. They had been on ice in the freezer since the indoor Barbeque and had been defrosting on my worktop for the last twelve hours. I used a separate knife from the one I used to prepare the vegetables and cut the sausages into narrow slices. I then fried them in a frying pan for fifteen minutes on a medium heat while turning them regularly.
I have a bit of a phobia about undercooked meat; it stems from a time when I accidentally consumed on a night out some raw chicken, which on the face of it looked cooked, and got food poisoning that de-railed me for a good week. This was the reason I pre-cooked the sausages prior to throwing them into the Le Crescent as I wanted to be sure they were cooked properly first before adding them to the vegetables. After fifteen minutes the sausages were ready and I dunked them in with the vegetables in the Le Cresceut. Once the vegetables had cooked for the twenty minutes they needed I added half a pint of vegetable stock and simmered the food for another ten minutes to ensure the carrots were softened as I did not want them al-dente.
After this I added a tin of Canelli Beans to the food and after warming it through for five minutes the soup was ready to eat.
This is one of those soups that is more like a casserole or a stew than a soup, which after a nine and a bit mile walk that featured almost every type of weather known to British meteorology bar snow, was a perfect dish to have as the last meal of the day. The Cannelli Beans and the sausages gave it a rich edge while the parsley, onions and the celery gave a flavour to it that was powerful in the best possible way.
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| Freshly cooked, crisp sausages simmered in parsley with vegetables and beans- the perfect match for the unpredictable British Weather |
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