Sausage, tomato and red wine pappardelle

Today was so beautifully warm that I spent the afternoon tidying up the garden. All the bulbs you helped me plant are just starting to poke through.

You helped me pick the recipe for tea too (you love looking through the food pictures in magazines, especially the cakes). It's based on one from Olive, but changed about a bit as I don't particularly like fennel.

You'll need:

some sausages (I used tiny chipolatas, which I chopped into small pieces)
a clove of garlic, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped (I also added a leek, because we're overrun with the things at the moment)
a glass of red wine
a tin of chopped tomatoes
pappardelle (these are big fat ribbons - oversized tagliatelle)

Fry the pieces of sausage until they're browned. You probably don't have to add any extra oil here, but keep an eye on them just in case. Add the onion (and leek) and garlic, and fry until they've softened.

Pour in the red wine, and let it bubble away furiously for a couple of minutes. Chuck in the tomatoes, and leave the whole lot to simmer for 15-20 minutes. You probably want to add some black pepper here too.

Cook your pappardelle in a large pan with lots of boiling water until it's al dente (shouldn't take long - maybe 8-10 minutes). Drain, and then tip it into the tomato and sausage sauce. Swish round, and serve with some curls of parmesan cheese.

Giant sausage roll

I can't really claim credit for this one - your Dad made it while I was on a trip to London. You both spent ages playing in the snow on Grandma's sledge today (the sledge is a doozy of a thing, a wooden bench on cast iron runners that's large enough to seat at least four small children, and goes like the clappers downhill).

You'll need:

200-300g sausagemeat (either split some sausages and remove the meat from the casing, or buy some sausagemeat - ours was pork and apple)
half a block (about 250g) of puff pastry
a little beaten egg

Making a sausage roll (or rolls, if you make little ones), is dead easy. First of all, you'll need to stick your oven on high (about 180-190 degrees C).

Then roll out your puff pastry, to A4 size. Assemble your sausagemeat along one side (in a long roll/sausage shape), then carefully roll up in the pastry. You'll need to seal the edge with a little water, or beaten egg.

Place on a baking tray (preferably on a silicon sheet, or sheet of greaseproof paper). Brush the top of the pastry with beaten egg. If you want it to look really fancy, you could slash the pastry top with a knife.

Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until golden brown. Obviously if you make small sausage rolls, these will cook quicker. You could get all poncey and start doing things with plaits of pastry, but to be honest the plain ones always taste the best.

Toad in the hole

After much explanation that no toads were harmed in the making of this dish, we ate it for tea, with some courgettes, sweetcorn and peas. There was a lot of explaining about Yorkshire pudding too.

You'll need:

sausages - we had about 14 little skinny thinny Cumberland ones
2 eggs
150g plain flour
150ml milk, mixed with 150ml water
a teaspoon of grainy mustard
a little sunflower oil

You need the oven good and hot, so stick it on at about 220 degrees C before you start.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, flour, milk and mustard, until it's stopped being hideously lumpy. According to the God of all sausage dishes, Nigel Slater, you want the batter to be the consistency of double cream, so depending on how large your eggs are, you may have to add a little extra flour.

Now your oven's hot, stick your toad in the hole pan(s) in, with a dollop of sunflower oil in the bottom. I used muffin tins today, to make mini toads, but you could just bung the whole lot in a baking dish (in which case you'll need a couple of tablespoons of oil in the bottom).

Once the oil's hot (should take just a couple of minutes), add the batter to each tin (it should sizzle nicely), and drop the sausages in. Try not to get spattered by any hot fat...

Bake in the oven for about 30-40 minutes, depending on the size of your sausages and how crispy you like your Yorkshire pudding.

Sausage and lentil bake

Another 'bung it in the oven and then forget about it' tea, which mainly came about because (a) we had some uncooked sausages left over from the barbecue and (b) I was going climbing up stupidly large walls.

You'll need:

a tin of chopped tomatoes
an onion, sliced
a clove of garlic, finely chopped
veg of some description - I had some mushrooms that needed eating, but I've also made this with courgettes or peppers
a couple of bay leaves, a pinch of thyme, and about half a teaspoon of smoked paprika
sausages
a few handfuls of lentils - 3-4 is enough for the three of us
lots of black pepper

First of all, you need to make a tomato sauce. Fry the onions and the garlic in some olive oil until they're translucent. Add the mushrooms/veg and cook until softened. Add the tin of tomatoes, a little extra water (some red wine would also go down well) and the herbs, and then leave to simmer for 20 minutes or so.

In the meantime, cook your lentils. Once they're soft, drain, and add to the tomato sauce, with lots of black pepper. Bung this mixture in a roasting tin, and add the sausages (you can create pretty patterns if you feel like it, but I just usually line them up). Cook in the oven for an hour or so, at about 180 degrees C. You might need to check it half way through to make sure it's moist enough - add a little extra water if required.

It works well with a little bread/pitta bread to mop up the sauce, and maybe a nice green salad on the side.

A beach barbecue

We spent the day up at Low Newton in Northumberland, with a sky that loomed grey and horrible, and a beach full of swirling sand.

It was all redeemed by a barbecue in the car park (in case it poured down, and we could escape into the cars). We lit the portable bbqs, got out some beer, the sky cleared, and the wind dropped. Perfect.

You'll need:

sausages (it isn't a barbecue without these)
a large baguette
salad (yesterday it was tiny tomatoes from Gran's garden, and chunks of cucumber)
some whole sweetcorn (and some butter/salt/pepper)
chorizo/babybels/crisps to keep the kids occupied while you cook the sausages
beer
ketchup/mustard of choice
some pudding (cake, strawberries, flapjack, that kind of thing)

Stick sausages on bbq. Attempt to avoid incinerating.

The sweetcorn's a little more fiddly - chop each sweetcorn into three, and wrap each in a piece of foil with a knob of butter. Stick on the bbq for 10 minutes or so, and then see if it's cooked. If it is, drizzle a bit of salt and pepper on top, and then try to avoid burning your fingers as you eat it.

Sausages with spicy tomato and chickpea couscous

A bit of a cheat, really, as the only thing I cooked today was the sausages and couscous - the sauce was made a few weeks ago and has been languishing in the freezer for a day when we got in late. We spent the afternoon in Leazes Park feeding the ducks, clambering in the playground and eating ice cream, so there really wasn't much time to be terribly creative for tea.

To feed all three of us, you need

6 large sausages (3 for your Dad, 2 for me and 1 for you - although you often nick some of mine as well...)

tin of tomatoes
one onion, sliced
tin of chickpeas
tomato puree
cinnamon/cumin, maybe a little paprika
veg - a pepper/courgette/aubergine, whatever you've got
a clove of garlic

Fry the onion and garlic in some olive oil until they're translucent. Add the pepper/courgette/whatever, and fry for a couple of minutes more until they soften slightly. Add a teaspoon of cinnamon and cumin, and if you'd like it spicy a teaspoon of hot paprika or chilli powder/flakes, and a squeeze of tomato puree. Fry for a minute or two.

Then add your tomatoes, and probably half a tomato tin of water. Bring to the boil, and then simmer for 15 minutes. Add your chickpeas, and cook for another 15 minutes minimum - it'd benefit from about an hour altogether, I reckon.

Cook your sausages - I quite like bunging them in the oven, or grilling them. You could also put them into the sauce to cook - just put them in at the same time as the chickpeas, and make sure you cook them for at least half an hour.

Serve the sauce sloshed over some couscous (about 6 handfuls-worth of grains seems to work for the three of us), with some green salad. There's usually enough sauce left to stick a couple of portions in the freezer.