The Haul, The Homies and The Holy Sh*t those are good sausages

When I was seventeen and eighteen I was a vegetarian for a year, not for any particular reason, just ‘cus.  Until one day my cousin and his friends stayed round after a weekend in Newquay and cooked sausages and bacon every day for breakfast.  I broke, which wasn’t hard considering I had no idea why I’d been veggie in the first place, and have happily eaten meat since.

I’m telling you this because when Nicola from Two Brothers Foods gave me these samples I was a. Extremely happy and b. Kind of nervous, these were the same foods that liberated me from my strange veggie state… what if they were gross and I then had to write all about it on the internet?

Here goes…

All the images on this post were taken by my wonderfully talented friend Josie Wooderson (thank you for you patience with all the sausage innuendos, my friends and I are not natural photography models).

Here is ‘The Haul’; bacon and sausages from The Kernow Sausage Company, BBQ and Harrissa spice from Nature Kitchen. I realised I couldn’t do this by myself (sharing is caring right?) so I invited a couple of friends round to help test the food.  We started with the Trelawney sausages;

I don’t know if this is weird but they kind of felt like good sausages, they didn’t rip when I tried to get them out of the packaging and no sausage meat squeezed out of the end as I put them in the pan.  So far, so good.

We only taste tested three as I saved the rest for Kate Bradley’s recipe (the one I alluded to here).

Poor old Josie had to wait for her turn as as photographer she had the very important job of getting photographic evidence of us eating.  After the tasting had been done we decided that the sausages were really, really nice; they were meaty and hadn’t shrivelled up to half their size, full of flavour.  But our favourite thing was the texture; they weren’t fatty or greasy but they also weren’t dry (as some ‘premium’ meaty sausages tend to go).  None of us had any gristle.  Liam said he’d ‘eat a pot of them’ no, I’m not sure what he meant either but he assures me it’s a good thing.

Next up was the bacon.  We stood for a minute before the rashers even got to the pan admiring the colour; this bacon actually looked like meat! No watery pink colour with oil-slick rainbow colouring. This bacon was almost red and really thick.

Fried to perfection (if I do say so myself).

All the lovely smells had attracted another friend, Molly, to the party and we sat down to try the bacon.  There was a moment after we’d tried the first mouthful when we all just looked up at each other, with that look.  The look of ‘this food in my mouth is like nothing I’ve ever tasted, oh good lord, give me some more now.’ It took us a while to calm down and actually be able to describe what we’d just tasted in actual words.  It sounds silly but we all agreed this bacon actually tasted like pig, it was tender and not too tough, or too salty. Yet it was light for bacon.  This is by far the best bacon I have ever eaten in my life (even better than the post veggie year break out bacon).  If you can take one thing from this blog… try this bacon, you will not regret it.

Now, I may be a food baby but I know one thing.  You can’t just eat spice on it’s own, it won’t be an enjoyable experience.  So in order to taste the Nature Kitchen spices I bought some chicken thighs and (following a suggestion on the back of the pot) used the Harissa and the BBQ mixes as a rub. Three thighs of each.

This took the longest to cook, but it’s the most delicious looking chicken I’ve ever cooked!

It ended up being a blind test (because I forgot which side of the pan I’d put which spice) but it turned out to be a really good thing as we really had to taste the chicken.  I’m the first to admit that spicy food is not my thing, I have a low spice tolerance and so was pretty nervous about the spiced chicken.

But it was fine! The spices were more tasty than hot, they really weren’t that spicy at all. We did think that they would probably have worked better as a marinade than a rub.

Overall the consensus was that we preferred the BBQ mix as it was tangy, smokey and sweet.

Now for the recipe from Kate Bradley.  Basically sausages, bacon and lots and lots of veggies!

I boiled up some carrots and courgettes then added them to a pan with chickpeas, butterbeans, the bacon and sausage and a couple of tomatoes. Then poured over some veg stock and added a generous helping of the spices.

Served with asparagus and purple broccoli that had been boiled for about 30 seconds to a minute.

Who knew sausages could taste so healthy? The spices really worked to pull the whole thing together and by the looks on everyones faces this was a hit! According to Liam it was, ‘banging’, again a good thing so I’m told! We all left the tasting with happy food babies.

If you want to try these foods I’ve linked to the websites at the top of the page.