Pork and Nettle Sausages with Wild Rocket Lentils

Last year, on Father's Day, Z and R clubbed together and bought me the River Cottage Baby and Toddler Cookbook.  This was meant to not only inspire us but to also guide us through the potential trauma of weaning.  It started off well, we thumbed through the pages, realised that what we were doing wasn't that bad and moved on.  The book, as with most of our cookbooks, hit the shelves after a couple of weeks.

To give it its due, it is a well written book.  It's full of useful tips and moves through the seasons.  It also moves through the stages of a child's development into cooking for the family.  I suppose it was only a matter of time, as with all of the cookery books that we own, that we would open its pages again and this is precisely what Z did earlier this week.

What she found was a recipe for lentils with watercress and onions.  We currently have an over abundance of wild rocket so a substitution was instantly on the cards.  The lentils were cooked in pork stock, with a crushed clove of garlic mixed through it, until the stock had been absorbed into the lentils.  They were then finished off with fried onions and fresh chopped rocket from the garden.

R had a portion of the lentils for his tea* and we had the rest of them for our evening meal.  We had bought some pork and nettle sausages from Swillington Farm at the last Kirkstall Deli market out of curiosity.  We simply grilled these and served them alongside the lentils.  I don't know what I was expecting from sausages with nettles in.  Perhaps a little more bite but you could tell they were made from fantastic pork.  The one thing we will be taking from tonight's meal is, we will be cooking lentils much more often.

*well it is a baby and toddler cookbook recipe.