Quick sausage & butter bean stew

Everybody in the world seemed to have an opinion and advice about weaning my tiny baby onto solid food; there was less information out there for this stage, a year on, where that tiny baby is, well, a little less tiny and has actual opinions and things.

I mean, it hasn’t really come as a shock, I somehow knew as he wolfed down lovingly prepared organic vegetables and melty puffs alike, that this would change.

And it did.

Dramatically.

So I made one of the 4689 things I worry about at any given time a mild panic that the Instagram babies eat all of their food from all of the sections of their bamboo plates whereas mine would only eat pasta from his. And the poor mite only has only one of those because I took the piss out of them so much my friend bought him one as a present.

But then, just a few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. We were at parent’s house for dinner, and my Dad has made a cottage pie, and Hugo wolfed down three bowls of it, chopped up carrots, parsnips, mushrooms and all.

And I did, too. Because it was really tasty.

Since that day, my cooking has made a shift away from the world of ‘wellness’, with carefully curated bowls of pretty plain vegetables to tasty, wholesome, family cooking.

So this recipe is a little bit of that; four of your five portions of vegetables for the day, full of fibre, but really, really tasty. Even better, it is is ready in 25 minutes.

And it is (mostly) being wolfed down, so I am happy here.

Baby steps.

Quick sausage & butter stew

Print Recipe

• Yield: 4 servings 1x

Ingredients

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• 300g good-quality sausages (meat or veggie, whatever makes you happy)
• 1 onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons light olive oil
• 2 tins butter beans
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 200g kale (cavolo nero is best)
• 100ml red wine
• 100ml double cream 
• Salt and pepper, to taste

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Instructions

1. Finely chop the onion.
2. Heat the oil over a medium heat, and add the onion, stirring well and cooking for 5 minutes.
3. Skin the sausages and add to the onion, stirring well to break them up and cooking for a further 5 minutes.
4. While the sausages are cooking, remove the stalks from the kale and shred.
5. Add the red wine to the pan, stirring well to deglaze the caramalised bits from the bottom.
6. Crush or grate the garlic into the pan and add the kale, stirring well and cooking for a few minutes.
7. Add the tomatoes and the butter beans, stirring well and cooking for a further five minutes.
8. Stir in the cream, and season to taste.
9. Serve.

Notes