Highly unusual for me to want to cook anything after a long Monday at work, but in my excitement of trying new things last week I purchased a load more food than I made time to cook.
So I’ve wound up with some sausages that are best before yesterday’s date that I’ve decided I’m going to chance.

Ingredients:
8 pork sausages
Homepride ‘Fred’s Favourites’ Sausage Casserole 500g cook-in sauce

The majority ingredents of the sauce are: tomatoes, onion, peppers, lemon juice and vinegar.

The 500g sauce and 8 sausages is designed to feed 4, but I’m going to use the whole lot for skinny little me, because the sausages are yesterday’s date and if I cook half, sods law says I might want slightly more than half.
Plus the serving suggestion to go with this is mashed potato – I hate the consistency of mashed potato so I won’t be having that with it.

Again, I’ve decided to follow the recipe on the sauce jar, rather than the meat.
The first step of switching on the oven was easy, but right after that I am slightly lost at step 2.
“Gently fry the sausages for 10minutes or until evenly browned”.
If truth be told, the last time I attempted a fry-up, my eyes really hurt from the smoke that remained for several hours afterwards.

I poured some oil into a frying pan, and added the sausages. I had a lot of instant browning, which I think meant the oil was too hot. I removed the frying pan from the heat, and turned the gas down.
Waited a minute or so and replaced it back on the hob but then it didn’t seem like it was cooking at all really.

Apparently people love gas because you can set it to whatever slightly different amount you want – but for me this isn’t helpful. I’m used to computers, commands that you assign to one exact setting or another.

After a lot of turning the dial a tiny bit up higher and higher til it seemed like things were cooking again, I thought I was getting the hang of it, when a spit of fat from the pan caught me about half an inch below an eye.
This seems dramatically more dangerous than yesterday’s wok experience. I think I may have put too much oil in, as the fat leaking out of the sausages plus what I had initially put in, made it look like I was frying a lunch meal for someone from Glasgow and hadn’t added the Mars bars yet.

After about 10minutes of poking and turning, some of my sausages looked brown. Some didn’t. Some looked decidedly uncooked. As I’ve no idea how to tell if sausages are cooked or not, I did the only thing I could think of and cut them all in half, to check if the middle was still pink.
Some were, some weren’t. I cooked the ones that weren’t til they were darker, but then.. how do I know if the remaining half a sausage is each still pink in the middle? I slice through a few more til my expensive butcher’s choice sausages look more like the sort you get on sticks at parties, and then finally decide to take a chance and assume they’re all cooked.

That done, I had to look for a casserole dish. I’m such an idiot.
I ask a housemate if we have one. My housemate says its round with a lid.
I bring him back something.
He tells me “No, thats a saucepan”.
I wasn’t even joking – it was a kinda odd shaped saucepan.

I found it eventually, added what looked like the best-cooked sausages to the casserole dish, poured on the sauce, and whacked it in the centre of the oven.
The sauce says to cook “for 30-35minutes or until cooked through”. How do you tell if a sauce is cooked through? Or maybe they mean the sausages.. maybe the sausages weren’t meant to be cooked fully when you put them in the oven? That seems unlikely.

I gave it about 34mins, took it out, emptied some onto a plate and tasted.
Not bad. It tastes mostly like sausages in gravy. Theres other things in it, but its mostly tastes of sausage and gravy. It’s not really as interesting as the oriental thing yesterday. Then again, I’m always drawn to things that are oriental – electronics, sweets, women, the list goes on.
I might make it again, but I’d have to have something with it – roast potatoes maybe.