When I visited my sister in London a few years ago, she gave a little booklet of recipe excerpts from Jamie’s Italy that came with the paper. I confess I am not a big Jamie Oliver watcher-too much saliva for me. But his recipes are reliably good and they do inspire my husband to give cooking a go which can only be a good thing. I’ve cooked the eggplant parmigiana from this book too and it’s great although eggplant, cheese and tomato can’t go wrong as a combination (unless of course McDonalds fiddled with it). I even bought a copy of this book for a friend of mine who is Italian-perhaps in the hope that she’ll cook some dishes for me!
After having a couple of “sausages and lentils” dishes in Paris, I wanted to try some of my own, albeit these would have an Italian flavour rather than a French one. I didn’t use Italian sausages as specified in the recipe but I had some great coarse grind Lamb, leek, thyme and mint ones. After watching an episode of “The F Word” where they discuss the minimum amount of meat that actually needs to go into a sausage (from a frightening 30% to the highest 66% for a gourmet variety in the UK) I have become a bit of a tray flipper carefully examining the % of meat in the sausages I buy. These are thankfully 76% meat and are by the “Coles finest” brand. Of course the packet doesn’t tell you know how much connective tissue is used but I am hoping not too much, especially if its a coarse grind sausage where the meat needs to be a touch more obvious.
And as you can probably tell I didn’t use green lentils as I only had brown lentils. I boiled them with 6 garlic cloves, 2 bay leaves and 3 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar and a fat pinch of salt and then tossed them in the oil that came out of the sausages.
