Apron Free Cooking ~ Bangers and Mash

By Noel Lizotte

One of my favorite Irish meals is Bangers and Mash. Besides hav­ing a really fun name to say, the food is good to eat! The proof being that my chil­dren leave empty plates and serv­ing dishes when­ever I make up this meal.

Bangers are an Irish sausage. Tra­di­tion says the name comes from the occa­sional sausage burst­ing while cook­ing and caus­ing a bang­ing noise in the pan. I’ve never had a sausage explode while cook­ing, but I’m pretty sure that’s a mess I don’t want to clean up. As a pre­cau­tion, I sug­gest always keep­ing a lid on your sausages.

Mash is sim­ply mashed pota­toes. You can up the Irish quo­tient by chop­ping up some cab­bage and cook­ing it with the pota­toes. Then mash the whole thing together with a lot of but­ter and salt. Col­can­non is a mix­ture of pota­toes, cab­bage and leeks, boiled and mashed together then sea­soned with salt, pep­per and butter.

A main ingre­di­ent in this recipe is pota­toes. For those of you who are stu­dents of his­tory, the Irish peo­ple ran into a whole pile of trou­ble when the potato famine hit their shores in 1845. The short­age of food became a major rea­son many fam­i­lies immi­grated to the United States. These fam­i­lies brought with them their tra­di­tions. St. Patrick’s Day is one tra­di­tion which has been accepted by nearly every part of the United States population.

Like most Irish recipes, this one is sim­ple and hearty. Many recipes from Ire­land are hum­ble foods, eaten by the largest part of the pop­u­la­tion. Very few Irish recipes are fancy or require rich ingredients.

Bangers and Mash

8 sausage links

Brown gravy

8 large potatoes

½ cup milk

4 TB butte

In a large skil­let, brown the sausages. In a large pan of water, place peeled and diced pota­toes. Bring the pota­toes to boil and cook until fork ten­der. Drain the pota­toes and place in mix­ing bowl with milk and but­ter. Mash the pota­toes with the but­ter until smooth. Serve a gen­er­ous scoop of pota­toes with two sausage links and gravy to each person.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Val­ues: Serv­ings 8. Amount Per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 570, Total Fat: 25g, Cho­les­terol: 61mg, Sodium: 1207mg, Total Carbs: 67g, Dietary Fiber: 6g, Pro­tein: 20g.

Make it a meal: Cooked cab­bage or Irish soda bread and but­ter make a good addi­tion to this meal. If you want to add some green veg­gies, con­sider some steamed broc­coli or a tossed salad.

You can use any sausage links you pre­fer, how­ever, you may need to adjust the serv­ing size based on your sausage selec­tion. If you use a nice Ger­man bratwurst type sausage, a sin­gle link will usu­ally work for a serv­ing. If you are using the lit­tle pre­cooked sausages that come from the freezer sec­tion, you’ll want to increase the num­ber of links you serve.

For the brown gravy, you may use the packet pow­der mix or canned vari­ety. If you want to make your gravy from scratch, then I say, go for it! I’ve just never had much luck with home­made gravy, so I stick with the sure thing. My fam­ily doesn’t seem to mind, they’re usu­ally wip­ing up the rem­nants of the gravy and mash with a slice of bread.

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! www.apronfreecooking.com.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Mar 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.