The dish to be prepared on this particular evening was one of my idiosyncratic takes on a traditional dish. I chose to make sausage casserole but instead of using normal sausages I used some Marjarom flavoured vegetarian sausages.
With Peter Gabriel's mature and well-wrought 1992 offering Us on the CD player I lightly fried four of the sausages with two sliced cloves of garlic, a cubed red pepper and two diced onions in some oil in my Le Creuscet Dish. As the ingredients began to cook I added half a teaspoon of chili oil, together with half a teaspoon of paprika and half a teaspoon of chili powder. These ingredients set the stage for a very distinctive-tasting and spicy dish.
After the dish had cooked on a medium to low light for ten minutes and the onions had begun to brown I added four fresh tomatoes, which I had previously sliced into quarters, the leaves of two sprigs of fresh thyme and 300ml of chicken stock. In order to make the dish a little richer I added half a pint of rose wine. This wine is usually reserved for the use of students in drinking competitions or as a pre-night out beverage of choice. However in this dish it made perfect sense as its taste worked well with the thyme and numerous spices in the dish.
I turned up the heat on the hob a little and simmered the dish lightly to evaporate the wine. I stirred the mixture regularly as it simmered for a further twenty minutes. After the twenty minutes were up I added a tin of butter beans and used a large metal tablespoon to blend them into the rest of the meal. After a further five minutes I was ready to serve the casserole.
The sharpness of the spices and fresh thyme coupled with the richness of the wine, protein given by the butter beans and the sausages made this a dish good enough for a Sunday dinner or an even more formal meal.
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| Just after the wine had evaporated; the dish was nearly ready at this point. |
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| A heady mix of spices, fresh vegetables, fruit and wine all in one meal. |
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