Frugal Food: Smoked Sausages and Leeks

We are eating very frugally at the moment - it is the start of the year so I like to bank some budget for special days, rainy days or days when we just have to splash out on a nice bit of cheese or fish.  So Sunday was an almost one pot of meal of smoked sausages cooked in a cast iron casserole with leeks, tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic and bulked out with some lentils.

The sausages are far and away the most expensive bit at €3.95 for six.  They are not the best - I love a Morteau but that firmly falls into the treat category - but not the cheapest either.  The flavour is definitely smoke and not just smoke flavour!  They are rich, so we will be eating three between us on day one with three more to go in the freezer for day two.  I'll also be making a soup from the remaining vegetables in the pot, flavoured with all the porky smokey goodness and perfect for a Monday night.

The method is painfully simple.  Chop and slice or chunk the vegetables and sweat down in some olive or butter.  Remove from the pain when they are soft and chuck in the sausages and brown a little.  Return the veggies to the pan, add two or three tomatoes, about half a tin, and a fistful of brown, green or yellow lentils.  Top up with water so that the contents of the pot are quite liquid, add a couple of peppercorns to the pot if you have them, bring to the simmer and leave to blip away gently for a couple of hours.  The lentils will take longer than normal to cook because of the presence of the tomatoes.  To speed the whole thing up, boil the lentils separately - about 20-30 minutes and then add to the pot when soft.  You can then get away with cooking the whole thing in about an hour.

The longer it cooks the better it will taste, and the second portion from the freezer will be noticeably better than the first!

Serve with loads of mash, fresh bread or soft polenta

The day three soup will be boosted with whatever veggies are to hand; I have a couple of winter squashes still to be started and there are also a lot of greens in the garden.  The January King cabbages are beginning to bolt, but the leaves are not yet too bitter.

So six sausages and some veg from the garden will yield three meals for two.  OK, so I know most people would be horrified at so little meat, but trust me, that is far more than we eat on most days.