Wanting to top up the meat, I stopped off in a Turkish supermarket on the way home and investigated the sausages. I plumped for a large thick baton style of beef sausage, as they had always intrigued me in the past. I also bought some sauerkraut, some American beans with chilli and some pitta bread for mopping.
The pitta bread unfortunately made me think of kebabs all the way home, so much so that the first thing I ate was about eight slices of the sausage fried with savoy cabbage and then heaped into a pitta with a couple of pickled chillis and drenched in West Indian Hot Sauce. It was super num num, but I had come to the realization that the beef sausage was a bit bland, and not wholly unlike spam*. Still the rest of the fried cabbage and some hefty chunks of sausage were thrown into MY BIG POT with two forkfuls of sauerkraut, a carrot, a bit more cabbage and as per yesterdays suggestion: some rosemary. Half a glass of wine was tossed in and it went back in the over for half an hour.
It was one of those night where you foody hankerings take over, and since I was still feelin’ middle eastern, I decided to serve the stew on couscous. I made too much weak chicken stock for the CC, and then dumped the rest in the POT. Squeeze of lemon on CC and in Pot, a few leavers chopped (slightly manky) flat leaf parsley stolen from flatmates drawer (enough so she would not notice) and I was away.
CONCLUSION: As I had already eaten the “kebab” I did not eat much of the stew, and went mainly for beans and vegetables. The liquor was now more astringent and pungent, which was just as well as much of the meat was starting to lose its flavour. Note to self, meat loses flavour when boiled lots. The new sausage crisped nicely in places, but it was the cabbage and sauerkraut which were really coming into their own with the beans. It soaked into the couscous nicely, and the squirt of lemon was most revivicating. What’s more, with the extra ingredients there was more at the end, than there was at the beginning.
*This would normally be a good thing in my book.