One of my most used pieces of kitchen equipment is this Kenwood Chef mixer that must be at least 35 years old, possibly older, but is still in perfect nick and complete with its original bowl.

It belonged to my mother who also gave it heavy use, so whatever it originally cost it was certainly very cheap at the price and is a testament to good design.

She acquired over the years various additions to this workhorse, some successful, some less so - a robust blender that would grind stones is still in use but a potato peeler that turned out to be considerably more trouble than it was worth has long disappeared. One attachment I use infrequently is the mincer, mainly because cleaning it is such a tremendous pain, involving serious levels of dismantling and poking at little holes and grooves to get rid of the remnants of meat that cling to every part of its inner workings.

However sometimes it’s worth it, and one meat I use it for is turkey. For all it’s popularity and association with festivity, turkey is a pretty boring meat. It doesn’t have a whole lot of flavour and is can be dry as a bone, so it needs work to make it interesting. But Lidls Turkey breast is good value and so is a fairly regular buy.

Often I stir-fry strips of it or slice it, stuff it and wrap it in prosciutto, but these turkey sausages are probably my favourite way of cooking it. Though I did slightly overcook the ones below, they were still very tasty.

You can use ready minced turkey for these, but in my experience it’s less successful. Any that I’ve tried seems to be pumped with water and as a result the sausages shrink up and go a bit soggy when cooked. I think we’ll all agree that a shrunken soggy sausage is a truly sad thing.

Moving on. Here is what you’ll need to make 16 sausages:

• 1 lb raw turkey breast, finely minced
• 2 roast red peppers (from the Lidl jars of pepper)
• 1 red chili
• A small onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• Putza Spice mix
• 2 oz butter
• About 3 inches of tomato puree from a tube
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• Salt and black pepper

Finely chop the onion, chili and garlic. Melt the butter in a pan and gently fry the chopped veg - you don’t want it to brown. While it’s frying chop or mash the red peppers roughly. Add them to the pan and season the lot with putza (which is really good in this) - about a heaped teaspoon full, though I tend to just shake in what looks about right.

When this is done, scrape it all into a shallow bowl, making sure you get all of the butter, and put it into the fridge to cool. It should be completely cool before you mix it with the turkey - which takes about as long as it takes to mince the turkey and clean the mincer.

Once the cooked veg is cool just mix it thoroughly with the minced turkey, add the tomato puree, season with salt and pepper and then mix in the egg. Pound this about a bit while you mix it - you need it very well blended together and kind of mushy.

The result is a little sloppy, but with care you can form it into sausage shapes. These need to rest in the fridge for at least an hour before you cook them to firm up.

I cook them in a George Foreman Grill, but you can grill them in the normal way or even bake them.

The addition of butter is in my opinion essential - turkey breast has almost no fat and without some the sausages are just too dry. But if you are watching fat you could try it without or with less.

We had these last night with mushrooms and cheesy mashed cauliflower.

Every time I make them I think that I should maybe buy the sausage maker attachment for the Kenwood, but  it would probably just be creating more washing-up.

Tags: Kenwood, Sausages, Turkey
Posted in Recipes | 1 Comment »

The vast money that companies spend on establishing their brands really works. We come to believe that a certain brand is the gold standard and everything else falls in behind it, usable or edible perhaps, but simply not as good. More often than not this has nothing to do with our experience of the alternatives, but because that idea has been so effectively fixed in our minds.

I’m very, very fussy about sausages. I love Superquinn’s sausages and they’ve been one of the things that keep me going back there.

So for all the time I’ve been shopping in Lidl, two years and counting, I never even tried their Irish sausages. I just assumed they’d be awful. Until Saturday.

I bought 9 premium pork sausages, which are 86% pork, for €1.99. They were absolutely gorgeous. I’d go as far as saying they might even be nicer than Superquinn’s.

I feel like a complete idiot for not trying them before now, but I’m not alone.

Ireland: Officially Brand Addicted

A report published in 2007 confirmed what has long been known by marketers - that Irish consumers are far more loyal to brands than their counterparts in Europe, with well over half of shoppers sticking to the brands they know and not shopping around.

To put this in context, only 8% of Norwegians were found to stick consistently to known products.

It may not be the only reason, but there is some justification for the comment from the survey’s author that: “this loyalty may help to explain why Irish people pay higher grocery bills than their European neighbours, as branded products are not being replaced with cheaper alternatives.”

Change is happening already. For one thing the clear trend in the survey is that the younger the consumer the more fragile the brand loyalty. And of course the coming to the market of Lidl and Aldi has definitely caused a drift away from better known brands. But it’s still a slow change.

Try Something Different

The other day I watched two women in succession pause in front of a display of dishwasher tablets, consider their options, and choose a box of Finish All in One at €8.99 for 30 tablets over a box of Lidl’s own brand W5 Perfect 5 tabs at €4.29 for 10 tablets more.

Now I’ve been using the Lidl ones for a long time, as have many people I know, and they totally do the job and do it very well indeed. You could see the women struggle to believe this, perhaps even because of the huge price difference. It’s quite hard to believe that something costing about a third of the price could be anything like as good as something you just ‘know’ is the best.

But if you use your dishwasher once a day, making this simple switch could save you almost €70 in a year - just on washing up! It may not seem like a fortune, but repeat a similar saving with 3 more items and it would be the equivalent of about a 1% rise in take home pay for someone on the average industrial wage. As the old adage goes, a penny saved is a penny earned.

So, here is a challenge for you: this week step outside your comfort zone, jettison one of the brands you have steadfastly stuck to and buy a cheaper alternative, not necessarily in Lidl, anywhere you like.

Sure, it may be a disaster. On Saturday, as well as the sausages, I also tried Lidl’s Toppers Diet Coke and I won’t be doing that again. But there are bound to be some revelations also.

Come back and share your experience - pooling our knowledge will make cannier shoppers of us all.

Tags: Brands, Diswasher Tablets, Prices, Sausages
Posted in Wasting Money | 24 Comments »