What to do when you have too many sausages
On Easter Monday we had hoards of friends descending on our garden for an annual Easter Egg Hunt (with chocolate eggs, of course! None of those namby-pamby decorated boiled eggs that have been sitting in the sun for an hour!) and pot-luck lunch. As always, I was terrified that we wouldn’t have enough food so I bought enough sausages to throw on the bbq for about 100 people. Our friends brought such delicious offerings, that we ended up grilling only half of the sausages. Now, what to do with all the rest? We had leek and sausage pasta sauce the next day, then sausage and borlotti bean risotto the day after. At that point, the rest of the family mutinied and threatened to set me loose in a dinghy (is that a kiwi word?? It’s a tiny boat that gets pulled behind a bigger one) and cast me adrift to float to North Africa if I dared to serve them up sausages one more time. But, I knew how to win them over! My mother-in-law’s irresistible recipe for sausages in tomato sauce or “salsicce con pomodoro”. Frankly, the title sounds much better in Italian than in English, but it tastes fab in any language!
Every culture has food they cannot resist eating
I did manage to get my kids to eat sausages one more time using this trick, though my husband, who’s a bit more onto it than them, declined…..at least until tomorrow when I make polenta and serve them together….hehehe! You just can’t turn that down…..not if you’re really from Piemonte in Italy like he is. That’d be like dissing marmite if you come from NZ, and we all know that that’s part of the Kiwi code of ethics drummed into you from birth……”I solemnly swear that I will never make a disparaging remark about marmite, or I will have my nationality stripped unceremoniously from me”.
This dish is wonderful with polenta or mashed potatoes: anything that will soak up all the more-ish gravy so that you don’t have to throw caution, and manners, to the wind and pick up your plate to lick it.
Braised sausages in tomato puree
Ingredients
- 3 – thickly sliced Onions
- 1 whole clove Garlic
- 12 good quality Sausages
- 250 ml 1 cup Red wine
- 400 g 1 1/2 cups Tomato puree
- 1 cube Beef bouillon
- Salt and pepper
Instructions
- Heat olive oil in a medium-size pot.
- Saute the onions and whole clove of garlic (it will be taken out at the end), stirring occasionally, until the onions become translucent but not brown.
- Put in the whole sausages and brown them. If you would like to reduce the amount of fat in the dish you can fry the sausages in a separate pan and add them to the onions once they are browned.
- Pour in the wine and let most of it boil off.
- Add the tomato, bouillon cube and salt and pepper.
- Top up with water so that the sausages are covered. Turn down the heat to medium-low and let the sausages simmer uncovered for 25 – 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Add a little water if they are getting dry. At the end, turn up the heat to reduce the liquid until it reduces and becomes thicker.