Sausage and Lentil Slow Roast

So, seeing as Dad had his own recipe incoming about a sausage and lentil thing, I decided I’d post my results to show you what I came up with.  Originally the idea struck me to do a slow roast, but most of the lentil/sausage hybrids turn into soup.  I had no idea how it was going to turn out once I took my own stab at it.

First what I did:

1. Gather a bunch of carrots, a white onion, celery, sausage, lentils, chicken broth, thyme, trader joe’s everyday seasoning, and of course, salt and pepper
2. Brown the celery and white onion in a frying pan.

I didn’t brown the carrots, cause browning carrots just seemed to dang weird to me.  I also didn’t brown all the veggies.  Some recipes called for browning the veggies, others did not.  I decided to do both of each so I could see which one I liked better for future reference.  Here’s hoping the combination doesn’t completely alter the broth taste.

3.  Brown the sausage

So, most of the pictures online saw people cutting the sausage into circles.  I tried cutting it lengthwise like Gordon Ramsay recommends in most of his sausage receipts.  He put skin side down first which I thought was odd and made it harder to cook.  After I flipped the Sausages, I found out why.  The skin on the back side if cooked second causes the sausage to shrink.  Where as if you fry it first, it just holds everything in place perfectly. Still, sausage is sausage.

4.  Put all the veggies, sausage, lentils, and chicken broth in a pot and simmer for a good long time

So I put everything in and wanted to see how it would turn out.  The buckling of the sausage may turn out to be an advantage, because it makes more the sausage naturally stick up out of the water to get more braised flavor on the meat.  I added some thyme, fennel seeds, and garlic to make it tastier.  Probably should have put in more minced garlic, but I had a brain fart and used powder instead.

5.  Enjoy:

So how did it come out?  Pretty great.  I just got a bunch of food from it.  It’s quiet amazing.  The lentils absorbed all the water and it was really a stew / lentil meal, with no water.  The slow roasting effect on the sausage was AMAZING.  The sausage was melt in my mouth.  It was so moist and tender, at first I was worried that it wasn’t cooked.  But inspection of all the pieces revealed it was.  The lightly fried onions really bring out a lot of flavor to the dish, as does the fennel and the thyme.