Proper Sausage & Mash

MY ULTIMATE comfort dinner/death row meal/cheer me up dish. Simple but effective and you can pack plenty of flavour into it!

Decent sausages (as I know them) are hard to come by here. Most British stores will have bangers but that's what I'd have for breakfast, not dinner. They're not very well seasoned. For dinner I want 'lincolnshire sausages' or 'cumberland sausages' and you can get them from a site called Jolly Posh (and probably others) if you want to invest. Otherwise the closest I've found is the pork 'bratwurst' sausage at the Sprouts counter (which tastes nothing like bratwurst, thankfully) or the Johnsonville breakfast sausages have almost the right flavour it's just sad that they're skinny :(

1. Quickly brown your sausages in a frying pan and then put them into a large ovenproof dish with big chunks of red onion and butternut squash (this helps flavour the gravy), some salt, pepper and dried mixed herbs.

2. Drizzle with olive oil, cook on 400F for 20-30 minutes, keep shaking so they brown all the way round.

3. Add in a generous slug of red wine and a cup of instant beef gravy, in the UK we use bisto which you can buy online here. Alternatively you could use beef stock thickened to gravy consistency with a cornstarch paste. Mix it up and return to the oven for a final 10 minutes.

Don't forget to make your mash at the same time, I just boil my potatoes and mash them with probably an unhealthy amount of butter, salt and pepper.

You can mess around with your gravy consistency by boiling it down on the stovetop or adding a thickening agent like gravy granules or cornstarch paste. Season to taste (but it should already be plenty flavourful). If you want to be super fancy you can make a from scratch onion gravy with this recipe https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/220517/onion-gravy-for-british-bangers-and-mash/

We serve this with steamed green veg...usually peas/broccoli/cabbage - but you choose!

Let me know if you try it!!