Getting home from work and having to think of what to cook is almost always a chore, especially when your hungry and want to eat very soon. The fridge had a tray of chipolatas and a few other semi-used ingredients sitting on the shelf plus a ½ bag of curly kale in the freezer. Looks like it was time to rustle up another mid-week bit-of-this-bit-of-that dinner. Sausages and bread was just too easy and in fact not good enough for the substantial meal I was craving so I dug through the pantry for that emergency tin of lentils and came up empty handed. Damn. Lucky for me the Vinayak Indian spice shop is close at hand and with a quick run around the corner and back I had my lentils, even if they were dried. The smallest I could find was dal moth, otherwise known as red mung bean so a ½ hour hot soak gave me the cooked lentils I needed in the beginning.

sausages with braised mung beans + curly kale

• approx 500 g chipolatas, or other sausages
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 brown onion, roughly chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely grated
• ½ cup red wine
• ¾ cup chicken stock
• 1 tbsp white balsamic vinegar
• 6 cherry tomatoes, halved
• sprig each of thyme and sage
• about 1 cup mung beans, or your choice of lentil, soaked, cooked in salted water & drained
• 60 g prosciutto, roughly torn
• 1 cup curly kale or spinach, torn
• Sea salt & freshly cracked black pepper, to taste

1. Preheat the oven 200°C.
2. Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium high heat and brown the sausages. Set aside.
3. In the same pan cook the onions and garlic until golden, add the red wine, balsamic, tomatoes and herbs and reduce by half before adding the stock and mung beans. Add salt & pepper to taste.
4. Pour the bean mixture and all of the liquid into an oven-proof dish, mix through the curly kale and top with the browned sausages and torn prosciutto. Bake for 20-30 minutes.   

Tagged as: Recipes