Post 94: Toulouse sausage in a creamy leek sauce with rosti.

I bought some Toulouse sausages at the weekend, because they looked nice in the butcher's window. Reason enough, I think. I was then rather unsure what to do with them, and a quick google gave me many repetitions of two recipes:
- Cassoulet with Broad Beans
- With creamy leeks, with rosti's

I had some Leeks in this week's box, so the decision was fairly clear.

For three of us, I cooked 5 big sausages until they were nice and brown all over. The recipe didn't say to do this, but I'm a bit obsessed so I threw 3 cloves of garlic in to the frying pan.


The creamy leek sauce was a doddle:
- slice the Leeks finely and fry for 5-6 mins (in my case two, because that's how many I had)
- Add 1 tea spoon of corn flour in an eggcup of water
- Add 200ml creme fraiche
- Add parsley; a big handful
- Cut the sausage up small and stir
- Done

I'd never made Rosti's before, but am a big fan of them from when I pretend to be posh and go to Betty's Tea Rooms.
- I grated two medium sized potatoes each
- And chopped finely 3 small onions (from my garden!)
- I then squeezed the potatoes to extract some water. This made an almighty mess, and if I ever try rosti's again, I'll have to find a better method
- Mix with the onion, some salt and pepper

I then tried to form these into rosti shapes and coat the outsides in flour. But I'd not extracted enough liquid from them. So I put a little flour in the mix, and generally hoped for the best, and then shallow fired them in the leftover sausage and garlic oil for 5 minutes a side. They seemed to be pretty good at drinking up the oil; so maybe this isn't the healthiest of meals.


This was generally ok and certainly it was a fine feed for £8 for the three of us. But it was nearly really really good:
- I need to improve the rosti's by using less flour and squeezing more water out
- 5 big toulouse sausages between 3 is too many. I'll reduce that to one each and correspondingly the amount of leeky sauce
- The leeks, creme fraiche and spicy sausages were quite a rich mix; the plate needed something plain and fresh to go with it - some peas, or french beans say
- Something of a school-boy error and something I should have thought of from my occasional trips to Betty's: A fried egg is a beautiful thing on a rosti