There are a few facts in life about feeding kids, and one that I’ve found to be very true is that they’ll eat nearly anything that contains sausages (or if they won’t eat it, at least they’ll pick the sausages out of it and eat them).
I fancied trying something different with sausages this week, and here’s what I came up with. I sort of threw it all together, and it worked. Four out of the five of us enjoyed it, which is good going in this house.
They are also more likely to try something with an interesting name, hence “cowboy stew”. Look at it, isn’t it exactly what you’d expect cowboys to be eating around a campfire 😉 We did have an interesting debate as to whether it was made FROM cowboys, but after much giggling and a lack of Stetsons being found in the pot the boys concluded that it wasn’t.
I made a double batch and it freezes well.
We served with mashed potato but it’d be great with rice or crusty bread too.
Ingredients (double batch, serves 8; recipe easily halves)
18 pork sausages (I either use butchers’ sausages or the 80% pork Specially Selected ones from Aldi- there’s 9 in a pack)
100g pancetta cubes
2 tins chopped tomatoes
2 500ml cartons of passata (you could use all tomatoes but I like the consistency that the passata gives)
3-4 tins of beans – I used 2 tins of mixed beans and one tin of kidney beans, cannellini beans, butter beans or chickpeas would also work well. I say 3-4 as I did think it’d have been no harm to have even more beans in it.
1 chicken stock cube dissolved in half a cup of boiling water
2 onions
1 red pepper
2 cloves garlic (crushed)
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon chili powder (more if you want a kick)
2 teaspoons sugar
Fry the sausages in your normal pan. Just before they’re cooked add the pancetta to the pan to crisp up.
While the sausages are cooking Dice the onions and fry them in a large saucepan with the crushed garlic and red pepper until they are soft.
Add the cooked sausages to the saucepan. Add the tins of tomatoes and passata, the sugar, the stock and the thyme and stir together.
Add the tins of beans, stir well and leave to simmer for about 20 minutes.
The longer you leave it the tastier it will be.
Enjoy!
Thought I’d found a spur there…
