Poland: Bigos (Hunter's Stew) with pork

Preparation: 15 mins

Cook time: 7 hours

Serves: 3 adults with seconds; two young teenage boys, with seconds; and Olivier, with thirds and two lunches.

Serve with: Crusty bread, but since we didn't have any, boiled potatoes were fine too.

Olivier's: ★★★★

The name of this one is kind of compelling, since most stews have the kind of meat that you might put in it somewhere in the title. Hunter's stew - well, it truly is whatever kind of meat that you managed to hunt. Plus sausage. And cabbage. Lots and lots of cabbage.

Because of the variations of meat that you could use, the recipes had a pretty wide ranging list of ingredients - red wine, Madiera, juniper berries, prunes, tomato, veal, lamb, venison, bacon, beef and pork, stock or no stock, grated apple, brown sugar, thyme, bay leaves and so on. I can only assume that the non-meat ingredients were intended to match the meat used. The common ingredients tended to be sauerkraut, extra cabbage, dried or fresh mushrooms, onion (what stew would omit onion though?) and Polish sausage.

The recipes that I read from were: this one, this one and this one. I think I tended towards the one from the BBC the most, because I forgot to get half of the ingredients for the one from Polska foods, and the one from the Paleo page seemed a bit lean. I improvised a lot of the ingredients, and got a pretty delicious stew out of it anyway. Our guests called it "epic" an epic number of times. And, you hardly notice the cabbage.

So, hoist your slow-cooker out of the bottom cupboard, while thinking about moving to a higher location as to save your back, and slow-cook your way to a cosy stew made mostly of pork and cabbage.

Front centre: sausage with a topping of pork knuckle, onion and sauerkraut.

Ingredients

900g pork knuckle (killing two kinds of pig with one stone - pork belly and bacon)

2 Polish sausages, cut into 2cm segments

1 onion

500g sauerkraut

half a red cabbage, shredded (should have been a green cabbage, but I prefer the sweetness of red)

1 medium tomato, diced (200g)

1 cup massel vegetable stock

1 cup of cheap white wine (should have been red, or Madiera)

10g shitake mushrooms (improvised from forest mushrooms)

½ tsp aniseed seeds (improvised from caraway seeds)

1 small handful of dates (improvised from prunes)

Method

1. Put all of the things, except for the sausage, into the slow-cooker

2. Cook on high for four hours

3. Pan-fry the sausage. Scatter on top of stew. Poke it in, but not too much.

4. Turn down to low for three hours

Notes

- Don't worry if it seems like there is not enough liquid - the cabbage releases ALL of its moisture and tops it up over the cook.

- The liquid somehow thickens at the end. I was looking at it about 2 hours from the end thinking that it was waaay too runny, but somehow, (maybe the sugar from the dates?) it becomes more gravy-like. It is still a bit thin, but the cabbage holds onto it when serving.

Next stop: Ethiopia