Keeping the wolf from the door

You know the way you hear people saying, “If I won the lottery, it wouldn’t change me one bit. I’d probably keep on at me work and put the money in the bank for a rainy day.”

These people: a). don’t have enough of an imagination or b). they’re mental.

For me, everything would change, change utterly. Work would instantly become a distant memory, my bank wouldn’t get a sniff of my cash and there’d be no such thing as a rainy day seeing as how we’d all flit to Barbados. Suffice to say, me and all my friends and family would go on a fair aul rip. It would be like a month’s worth of St Patrick’s days all rolled into one, except there’d be an army of people to clean up the houses – no, villas – of a morning, after the gaffs had been wrecked.

The dust would eventually settle of course and the rip would inevitably have to be brought to an end, but only via promises of future rips on a regular basis in varying far-flung destinations around the globe.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya,

Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama,

Just like The Beach Boys at Kokomo, there would be mighty craic to be had from now until kingdom come. Come to think of it, maybe we could even hire The Beach Boys to come play in our back garden when we return home.

We could all apply for our helicopter licenses and fly in formation as the ‘Boys knock out a version of ‘I Get Around.’

In short, there would be no end to the imaginative craic, if and when those lucky numbers come up.

One thing I wouldn’t alter however, no matter what happens down the line – enhanced monies or otherwise – is my cooking.

Honest to God, but if I won the Euromillions on Friday night, I’d still be stood in my kitchen knocking up some kind of dish to devour at length albeit with a lottery-inspired smile on my face.

Maybe, come Saturday night, we’d be out for dinner (sure we’d be millionaires, after all). But come Sunday, I’d be back in the kitchen plotting yet another dish whilst also plotting the next far-flung destination and wondering about what wondrous ingredients might be found among the local markets.

If everyone has their niche, mine is a Saturday night in the kitchen. A lottery win would simply mean different kitchens in different countries with different wines and different ingredients. So long as I can fall asleep in front of Match of the Day later in the evening, I’ll be a happy lottery winner.

You may have noticed from the photos included, but with or without the lottery win, I’m still cooking on a Saturday evening and it’s still the best thing in the world.

Until that much-mentioned financial windfall arrives, I’ll also be trying to live within my means. And that means, dishes like sausages on a bed of green lentils with tomatoes, garlic and rosemary.

As you can also see, I’ve done this dish on subsequent weeks with two types of sausage, although I’m pretty sure it would work with any kind.

The big U-shaped lad is a Corsican speciality, a figatellu, which was gifted to me some time ago by a fellow greedy-gut. The other pic includes a bog-standard pack of regular pork sausages. Both dishes worked perfectly well with their associated sausages and if I’m honest, the rest of the family preferred the regular pork sausages over the figatellu. On both occasions too, the casserole dish was scraped empty and with the cunning use of some sourdough bread, the same dishes were wiped clean.

This is a perfect dish to employ as a means of keeping the wolf from your door. Depending on the sausages used, you can serve the whole thing up for less than a fiver.

INGREDIENTS

6 or 8 sausages, depending on how many mouths you’re feeding

oil for frying

1 or 2 tins of green lentils, drained and rinsed

1 tin of tomatoes

3 cloves of garlic, bashed but unpeeled

1 tsp of honey

half a tsp of dried rosemary or one whole sprig

half tsp of salt

quarter tsp of pepper

THE PLAN

This couldn’t be easier.

Fry up the sausages in the oil in a hot frying pan until they take on a bit of colour – about five minutes – but you don’t need to cook them through. Remove from the heat.

Dump the drained lentils into the casserole dish.

Tip in the tomatoes, drizzle on the honey, add in the rosemary and the seasoning. Mix through, lay on the sausages and retire the whole shebang to the oven (pre-heated to 180C) for 18 minutes.

And that’s it. Following a lottery win, I may well have more money than sense (I’ve more money than sense now, to be fair) but I’ll still be making these fantastically humble dishes at every opportunity, which is to say, every single Saturday night in life.