Hot Italian Sausage with Lentils

Coming up with meals that are relatively high in protein and low in carbohydrates is sometimes tough when you don’t want to eat just a steak or a chicken breast.

That’s why I leave it to the pros. If you follow Gordon Ramsay on twitter, there’s a good chance that, on any given Friday, he’s going to dump a photo and recipe that fits the bill.

Weeks back, he posted a recipe that I needed to try!

When I read it and saw the picture, I finally realized that stuffed lentils isn’t the only thing you can make with lentils!

To get started, I laid out my ingredients.

Instead of bacon lardons, I fried up some pieces of guanciale, because that’s what I had.

After these crisped up nice, I added my diced onion and carrot along with the bay leaves.

After a magical pot change, I added the lentils (a full pound – I went with regular green lentils rather than put out effort to find puy lentils – I’m sure I also saved money) and added just enough water to cover along with some salt and pepper.

Once the water came to the boil, I covered it and moved on to the sausage.

I fried up a smashed garlic clove in a few tablespoons of olive oil.

In the meantime, I separated the tied sausages into links and discarded the string.

These went into the hot oil…

…and I browned them up real nice.

Once browned, I added enough white wine to come up the sausages about halfway.

I allowed this to cook on a low-medium heat for about 20 minutes. At that point, the white wine should start to coat the back of a spoon almost like a sauce.

The lentils and sausage were ready at just the same time, but, for good measure, I added the sausages to the pot with the lentils and nestled them in to allow the flavors from the sausage to start to enter the lentils.

To serve it up, I put about 3/4 cup of the cooked lentils on the plate and nestled 3 sausages on top. I garnished with (too much) parsley, and then enjoyed the meal.

What I liked about it was that the lentils had a persistent texture that was almost like rice in a way. Taken along with the spicy sausages, there was plenty of flavor in the lentils themselves, and occasionally, I hit a carrot or lardon that added some variety to every bite. This one is definitely getting filed in the High Energy cookbook, and is something I look forward to making again. Maybe next time with my own homemade Italian sausage, not that I even think mine could be as good as Dad’s or anything…