tana ramsay's sausage casserole, with savoy cabbage and butter beans & bill granger's sweetcorn chowder

After two days of basically eating cake and sweets, we're back to normal. Albeit an experimental normality as tonight we're having a sausage casserole stuffed with cabbage, leek and mushrooms to see if we can expand Milo's veg intake beyond tomatoes, mini-versions of things, potatoes (particularly in chip format) and broccoli.

Naturally it contains one of his five-a-day sausage portions, but interestingly it also contains pancetta, chorizo, and butter beans. It comes from Tana's Family Cookbook, and it seems an ideal pre-buy test.

Things go swimmingly. You basically whack it all in the pan and leave it simmer, giving me plenty of time to make 2 litres of this week's lunch soup, Bill Granger's sweetcorn chowder, and still be ready to make mash in time to watch Whites:


However, for some reason whilst my potatoes go lovely and tender in the soup, in a shorter period of time, the ones bubbling away on the hob simply refuse to cocking soften. In the end, a full hour after I started them, I end up mashing them in the saucepan in the front room so I could watch TV. And they gave me a blister from the mashing. Lucky the stew was so divine, and with enough portions for us to have seconds, Milo to have some tomorrow, and put two pots in the freezer for him later:


Food of the Milos
The post-birthday come down doesn't seem to him as hard as us. He has his usual breakfast (today with cheese), eggs and cake for lunch, and chicken stew with apple sauce and tarragon for dinner. Again, he's not amazed by it, but neither did he refuse it, so we'll count that as one in the bank to try again.

sources
sweetcorn chowder - Bill Granger, Every Day, p246
sausage casserole, with savoy cabbage and butter beans - Tana Ramsay, Family Kitchen although I half inched it from Delicious circa 2005.