The last stew

We took our last sausage stew of the old year, the day before New Year's Eve. Preparation started around 11:00, forks down around 13:30.

Started with butter, garlic, bashed black pepper, onions, tomatoes, red pepper and green pepper, bringing the ingredients on one at a time. Let the whole simmer for an hour or more.

Getting towards 13:30, lid half off and heat up to get some of the water off. Then lid back on for some celery, 200g of Bastides and lastly some mushrooms. Chopped stalks first, then the peeled caps. Not in their first flush of freshness, so peeling was indicated.

In parallel, 7oz of tubes and an entire chou pointu. This last cooked for perhaps 3 minutes. No added salt! I dare say that there was quite enough of that in the sausage.

Did about three quarters of it at the first sitting. Taken with some lemon squash: just lemons, sugar and water. Couldn't be bothered with the barley on this occasion, although I do rather like lemon barley water.

The left overs served as Palermo Pie later that same day. That is to say, the remains of the stew topped with the remains of the tubes and warmed up, in this case in the microwave. A dish invented by the Sicilians during the landings during the second world war, a variation of the cottage pie popular with the troops from the UK. Dished up by their field kitchens using tinned mince but real potatoes.

PS: I remember that adding salt to the water used to clean and cook vegetables was normal when I was young. But then it was also normal for most green vegetables to be infested with all kinds of animal life, and the salt helped get rid of it.