Jack Frost returns...and he brings with him his trusty side-kick, Frosty the Snowman

Yep, that's right...just when we were starting to feel a glimmer of hope that winter might be fading away (it was down-right sunny on Saturday!), winter comes back to kick you in the arse with its frosty toes. It snowed pretty heavily all damn day yesterday and that meant comfort food was going to be very high on the agenda last night (although, if I'm honest, pretty much all food is comforting to me so I could have had a salad and potentially achieved a similar feeling of succor. Tis unlikely though, since, as that stalwart of cartoon comedy Homer Simpson has been known to chant, 'You don't win friends with salad'!). You do, however, win friends with my sausage casserole (as long as said friends aren't vegetarian. You could make this sauce with some pinto or navy beans though, and it would be pretty damned comforting). It's my own slightly modified version of an Alison Holst devilled sausage recipe and I've honed it to what I (modestly) think is perfection over the years. Here 'tis, in all its warming glory. Best served on giant piles of fluffy, garlicky, well-seasoned mashed potato, but also good on rice (which is how we had it because I'd used the last of the spuds making soup for lunch) and with a mandatory green vege on the side.

Sausage Casserole

6-8 proper sausages (we got ours at the Richmond market from this small independent producer and they were, as Rick Stein has been quoted as saying 'really very good'!)
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic (it is winter after all!), chopped
1-2 apples (technically you should use cooking apples here, but I use whatever I have to hand and it always turns out well), chopped into 1cm cubes
1 heaped tsp ground cumin (although I was, shockingly, out of ground last night and had to use whole cumin seeds instead. This also worked rather well. Can't believe I was out of grd cumin though - it's easily my favourite spice! Quelle horreur!)
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp cornflour
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp dijon (or other) mustard
1 and 1/4 cups water
salt/pepper

Heat a large casserole on the stove top and gently fry the onion, garlic and apple in some oil until softened and just starting to brown. Add sausages and cumin and fry for 30 secs or as long as it takes you to do the next step. Mix the rest of the ingredients together in the order listed (that will stop the cornflour going lumpy) and add to the casserole. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover and cook for an hour. Feel free to be fancy and toss through a handful of chopped parsley if you must, but this is by no means necessary.

If you don't have a stove-top casserole dish, you can make this in the oven simply by bunging all the ingredients together in an oven proof dish and cooking (covered) at 180degC for 1-1 1/2 hours.

If I'm feeling super lazy and want a meal that can be shovelled in one-handed, then I slice the sausages into bite-sized rounds - either before cooking or after (after is actually easier). Then you can do away with the knife and eat this while curled on the sofa watching something truly trashy on the box! Comfort with a capital C.