Cooking under lockdown. Sausage meat ragu with tagliatelli inspired by Rick Stein.

As many of my readers know I don't really do recipes and in this particular case I was inspired by one of Rick Stein's programmes in the series Rick Stein's Long Weekends where he visits the Italian city of Palermo and speaks lovingly of a sausage meat based ragu. I love all his programmes but this series is especially inspirational even if you haven't been to any or some of the destinations. I must have watched it over and over and it comes highly recommended!

 

I happened to have six big fat tomato sausages from the local butcher (Ruddington Village Butchers) and I thought they would be too much to cook all at once unless I took them out of their skins and made, for the first time, a ragu.  

Initially, I chopped up three small white onions and a similar amount of fresh tomatoes and added a small amount of chopped fresh rosemary and four chopped garlic cloves to the well mushed up sausage meat. Obviously I took the sausage skins off the sausages first.

It became hard to tell if the sausage meat was cooked as I fried it in olive oil but I kept moving it around the pan and added a tiny bit more oil when it started to look a bit dry. Then I added the chopped onions as I wanted the flavour adding into the ragu not starting with onions as a base. My intention was to have the onions provide a flavour note but not get over-cooked or burnt. The tomatoes went in next as the onions began to wilt and smell fantastic.

After about 10-15 minutes of cooking in the frying pan I became convinced that the sausage meat was now properly cooked and from here I added a tin of chopped tomatoes, stirring it in and followed by adding a small jar of Lloyd Grossman Bolognese sauce, reducing the mixture and adding another. They were on offer at £1 each so the expense wasn't too bad and the sauce was of a high quality.

Time to put some tagliatelle pasta on the boil and, once it was al dente, I griddled a few thin slices of aubergine and added a few fresh basil leaves to the finished dish. As I had made rather a lot I shared some with my neighbours. They were very impressed.

Delicious!