Carrot, Parsnip and Sausage One-Pot Dinner

I love parsnips.  They must have to be in my top five all time favourite vegetables.  Unfortunately for me though, parsnips seem to be ridiculously expensive.  I still haven't quite worked out why or how they can possibly really cost $10/kg.  Roll on the day when Hubby and I finally get the vege patch up and running and I grow my own (please, oh please let there be a variety that is happy to grow in South East Queensland!).

In a celebration of the wonderfulness of parsnips (and the fact that I had some), along with a hectic day and a cold wintery night, recently I found this lovely one-pot recipe in a new favourite recipe book of mine - Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion and decided it ticked all my boxes.

I had to amend the recipe slightly as I went - simply because I think my dish was smaller than the one in the recipe and because I wanted to sub out some carrot and sub in some sweet potato and potato.  But in the end, I cut up carrots, onions, parsnips, sweet potato and little potatoes we happened to have in the fridge.

I cooked the onion slices off in a pan with some olive oil, and then poured some more olive oil into a pyrex glass dish and then added all the veges, 2 unpeeled garlic cloves and 2 bay leaves.  I covered the lot with foil and popped it in the oven for 20 minutes on 180.

Once the 20 minutes was up, I pulled the dish out of the oven, turned the vegetables over and added in eight sausages, making sure they got coated in plenty of the oil in the dish.  Then I popped the onion in over the top, put the foil back on and put it back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

At the end of the second 20 minutes, I pulled the dish out, took the foil off and turned the vegetables and the sausages.  I had been concerned that the sausages wouldn't cook all the way through, but after 20 minutes they were looking good!

The final stage is to crank the oven up to 200, put the dish back in (without the foil) and cook for about 15 minutes (have a look at it after 10 and see what you think).  To serve, I just put the dish on a trivet on the table, and had a stack of fresh crusty bread on hand to go with it.

Hubby whipped up a simple gravy to have alongside it as well, which really just finished things off.  Can I just say, this dish is an ABSOLUTE WIN.  It was so easy, and so much is done by the oven, rather than the cook, that it's not a big ask to duck away every 20 minutes to turn the veges over.  We had enough left over (from feeding four) to feed two with left overs the next night, so, depending on the veges you choose (you don't HAVE to use parsnip), it can be a super cheap dinner.

Spicy Meat Gumbo

Recently my Sis presented me with a copy of Jamie's America - complete with her own notes scribbled across the Spicy Meat Gumbo recipe inside.  I've been hanging out to give it a try after hearing about her success with it, and decided that the three days I was going to spend at my parents house on a mini break between jobs would be a great time to give it a crack.

Mum was provided with an emailed list of ingredients that we needed for the great cooking extravaganza, and on Monday afternoon I made a start.

Can I just say now.  Any recipe that requires THIS MUCH organising, chopping and sourcing ingredients does leave me a bit cold.  I'm all for recipes with just a handful of ingredients - not a page long list (I ended up ticking things off the recipe as I prepared them, and then again as I added them to the pot to make sure I didn't miss anything).  I subbed out some of the sweet potato and used some parsnip on the grounds that Mum had a heap that needed using up.

So, first things first - I cut up all my chorizo, bacon and got my chicken legs ready (I didn't have any chicken thighs - Mum and I protested when we saw the price per kg and decided not to bother).  Next I cut up the onion, capsicum and celery.  Then I got a bit frustrated with the endless cutting up and Mum jumped in to handle the sweet potato and parsnip while I seasoned my chicken with cayenne pepper, paprika, salt and pepper.  

Next I popped some olive oil in a pot, heated it up and put all the meat in.  Which lead to the frustrating conclusion that the pot was not big enough for that.  Ignoring my Mum's suggestion that I should remove the chicken from the leg bones, I poured it all into a large frying pan and browned it all off.

After the meat was browned, I pulled it all out of the pan, leaving as much of the juices as I could in the pan.  Next I tipped in the onion, celery and capsicum and cooked it off for a few minutes until it went nice and soft.  I was a bit hesitant about the next bit - making a roux.  I know that if you don't cook the flour off properly, the whole dish will taste chalky (haven't we all had a creamy pasta that tastes a bit weird?).  But I threw in my three heaped tablespoons and started stirring on a low heat.  This bit took AGES, and it was really hard to be patient, but I perservered until it went a nice dark peanut butter colour.

At this point, you're supposed to put the meat back in, add some garlic, the sweet potatoes and the parsnip and then stir fry it all for ten minutes.  I quickly realised, however, THAT MUM WAS RIGHT.  Because I hadn't taken the chicken off the bone, my meat wasn't going to fit in the pan.  Let alone the 1.5L of stock I still had to add.... SIGH!  I spent a few frustrating minutes trying to bone the chicken pieces while they were hot, sticky and covered in paprika and cayenne pepper, but eventually the chicken was in the pan and the bones in the bin.

I covered the lot with chicken stock (Jamie said hot, but I said poo to that and poured it in straight from the container) and then brought it to the boil.  Last step was to let it simmer for 45 minutes (or the chicken was nice and tender, and the vegetables soft and cooked through.

Mum cooked up mess of rice to go with it, and we had some crusty baguette slices to sop it up with.

Things I learned while cooking:-

- Listen to your mother.  She is invariably right.
- Check the sizes of your pots before you start.
- Use the best chorizo you can find - ours was not great.
- Gumbo tastes better the second day (I had it for dinner the following night too)
- Taste it before you serve it - mine definitely needed more cayenne, more salt and more pepper