Tasty Sausages with Polenta Chips

My first time cooking polenta! It thought it was alright, but it was also my first time eating it so I'm not sure if I missed the mark or not.

Tasty sausages (finally!)

8 sausages (sliced diagonally into 4)

2 onions (sliced into wedges)

4 mushrooms (sliced in half. Feel free to use more)

2 tomatoes (sliced in half. Feel free to use more)

Good splash olive oil

Generous drizzle worcestershire sauce

salt

pepper

Combine everthing in a roasting pan and mix with your hand to make sure everything is coated nicely. Bake at 200 degress Celcius for 20 minutes or until cooked.

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Polenta chips

2 cups polenta

4-5 cups water

salt

1/4 cup parmesan cheese

pinch thyme

Boil water and gradually pour in polenta, constantly stirring. Stir as it cooks until it is done (tender, also a spoon should stand up in the middle). Add more water if you think you need to. It should be sort of porridgy when it's done, but not too wet, so don't add too much water. Stir in the cheese and thyme. Spread out flat on greaseproof paper on a baking tray/in a brownie tin/other flat tin and refrigerate overnight to set OR cover and put in freezer for 20 minutes. Remove from freezer and turn out onto a baking tray (it should just fall right out of tin without help). Slice into chip shapes, spread out on the tray and grill until beginning to brown, 15-20 minutes.

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I loved the sausages, they were a bit dry because in my hurry I turned the oven off and left them in there rather than taking them out, but the flavour was good. I wasn't too hot on the polenta, but I liked it well enough. It's good to have another option for a side dish. Maybe polenta is just not my thing. I only cooked/had it because it was passed on to me from a friend moving overseas emptying out her cupboards. Still. It was ok.

Birthday Dinner!

This is the table before half the food was out. I was more taking pictures of the cakes. But yes. This is what we had for dinner tonight.

Party food. It was great.

Rachel's Roasted Sausages

We had sausages tonight, cooked in a way inspired by Rachel's comment on my last post.

Roasted Sausages

5 sausages

2 large potatoes

2 onions

5-10 cloves garlic

2 roma tomatoes

Generous drizzle olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp paprika

1 tsp tobasco sauce

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius. Slice sausages diagonally into 4 pieces each. Slice potatoes in half and then into wedges, skin on. Peel and slice onions into wedges. Peel and slice garlic cloves in half. Quarter the tomatoes. Toss all in a roasting pan.

Drizzle with olive oil. Season with all the seasonings listed. Mix with your hand in the pan until all pieces are well coated.

Cook for 1/2 an hour, remove from oven and turn with a large spoon. Cook for another 15-30 minutes until all the potatoes are cooked.

(The mix, sans potatoes, which I put back in the oven for a few extra minutes.)

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I served this with a salad and really liked it. Thanks Rachel! I'll be doing this again. Hopefully I'll have some capsicum (what we call bell peppers in NZ) next time to toss in as you suggested as well.

Bangers and Mash

Saucy sausages (like devilled sausages but without the apples pretty much) from an Alison Holst recipe with mashed potatoes, peas and corn. Nothing special.

What do you do with sausages? Tonight while eating dinner I said to Nat "How do you make them taste good?".

Any ideas?

Pumpkin Penne

... aka "Experimental pasta #2 (or 3. Maybe 4, 5 or 6.)".

Trying to make something quick and easy, I thought I'd use a can of pumpkin soup as a quick pasta sauce.

I chopped two kransy's and fried them up. I started my penne boiling. In another pot I emptied the can of soup, added 3 Tbsp of both sour cream and cream cheese and about 6 Tbsp of milk. Stir as it heats until smooth. I added a pinch of both paprika and nutmeg.

At the last minute I decided some green in the salad might look nice so microwaved some peas and added fresh basil leaves as well as the sauce and kransy's. Stir to mix. Top with parmesan cheese.

I cooked half of a 500g packet of penne and used half the pot of sauce that I'd made. It tasted fine, the kids liked it, BUT, if you're going to make something similar skip the peas and basil. Add way more kransky (it's really the star of the dish) and parmesan. Toasted pine nuts would be a welcome addition too.

After all that I found something in the fridge that would have been much faster.

Doh.

Tortilla Pizza

It's hot here today (hot for Wellington anyway) and we hardly feel like doing anything. Solution? Tortilla Pizza. They're not as filling as regular pizza, for obvious reasons, but they're just as delicious. Lucky the heat also makes us less hungry.

Using tortilla's as our bases, I topped our pizza with a half/half mix of tomato paste and sauce (to save on paste and to sweeten it), grated cheese (we buy Edam), sliced Kransky sausage (is there anything these sausages can't do?) and fresh basil leaves (if using again I think I'll add after cooking rather than before. The heat from the pizza would wilt the leaves rather than the grill in the oven shrivelling them). Be careful not to overload your little tortilla base. They're nowhere near as sturdy as a pizza base.

Simple, quick, easy, delicious. Perfect.

Midnight Spaghetti 5 (with a twist...)

Tonight I made midnight spaghetti with a few variations:

Wholemeal Spaghetti

The kids always want to try mine when I serve myself the wholemeal and they have regular so I cooked it up for everyone tonight. It seemed to go down just as well as regular spaghetti with them (don't worry Nat I won't do it all the time because I know wholemeal is more expensive).

Kransky Octopuses

Someone I read (also a friend/relative [if you can have a sister-in-law twice removed]) suggested these through a comment on the blog. Almost every comment effects what I cook, so get commenting. Thanks Mika! I decided on these after looking in my fridge for veges that I could add, after Rachel's suggestion, but we didn't have any I thought were suitable. We did have Kransky's though!

Cream Cheese

I figured Kransky's are cheesy so I added cream cheese to the pan after the spaghetti to try and make it a creamy sauce. It tasted fine but if you want to try it I suggest adding the cream cheese to your sauce/frypan before the spaghetti so that it gets all melted and mixed well first.

Breakfast

Quick and easy again, breakfast for dinner. We had scrambled eggs, toast, kransky sausages (frankfurters for the kids. Save the good stuff for people who care), peas and corn.