Italian-style sausages in grape must
Another Maggie Beer recipe. That book is fantastic.
The recipe:
First I peeled and quartered 4 desiree potatoes, throwing them into a pot of boiling water. I put a lightly oiled deep frypan on a moderate heat and added 8 italian-style pork sausages to seal.
Then I grabbed 1 kilo of muscatel grapes, a sieve and two bowls - well, a kilo minus all the ones Lisa has obviously been sneaking since I bought them on Sunday! I picked the grapes off the stems and pushed them through the sieve in small groups, mashing them with my fingers and against the sieve. I recommend getting them out of the fridge (if you keep them there) well before this because they were damn cold on my hands.
Freshly created grape must got dumped into a separate bowl while the larger bowl held the sieve and captured all the juice. This took a while! You can use a food mill, if you have one, but I quite enjoyed the mucking about.
Once the sausages were consistently sealed (gotta turn them with your clean hand!) I added a rough pour of 150ml or so of the grape juice to the pan, put the lid on and left them.
After about 10 minutes, I turned the sausages and covered them with the grape must, smothering them. Then I poured the remaining juice on top, and cranked up the heat to max.
I put a pot of water on to boil and chopped up some broccoli. I put the broccoli and some squash on to steam over the boiling water.
Time to start serving!
I drained the potatoes, added two good-sized dollops of butter, a decent dash of milk, some rough-chopped fresh chives, mashed it up into a lovely creamy swirl and served
I plucked the sausages out of the pan, and placed them aside. Then I separated the grape must from the juices and made a small bed of it on each plate. I placed sausages on each bed and added a splash of must on top.
Lastly I added the other vegetables, but I hadn't really planned out the plate, so the veges were kind of squeezed in on the side.
Then I poured a delicious Happy Goblin beer. I reckon I earned it!
This dish was a lot of work, but mostly because I'm not used to the timing and management of cooking various different things at the same time. That will get easier with practice and everything else was easy and fun!
This is probably my favourite dish so far this week. The rich flavour of the sausages and must against the crisp freshness of the steamed vegetables and the creamy mash totally made it for me.