Day five - Thursday 5th Feb

Who likes sausages? Me! I like sausages. I've eaten a lot of sausages in my life, a fact that most people that have met me can testify to by the length of my waist line. I am a sausage eater and no mistake. It is vital for me to impress upon you, Dear Reader, just how much I love sausages, because only then you will be able to understand why I don't eat them more than once a month. For me, sausages represent the bedrock of a more sensible outlook on food. In the kitchen, as in life, you start with the sausages.

I am lucky enough to have spent a significant amount of time in Europe over the past few years. Without exception, every single one of my continental cousins (and a few ex-Brits too) are proud about some aspect of their diet; be it a specific emphasis on local produce, the highlights of one particular local speciality or even the identification of a national dish. Looking around me, I have to ask myself, when did we lose ownership of the sausage? The British sausage is known the world over, but for all the wrong reasons. When we visit a hotel or B&B, why are we so surprised when we are confronted by a half decent sausage? 'Mmmm', we say; 'that's a nice sausage'. Why is this the exception? Pastel pink meat flavoured foam filled tubes seem to be normal and any deviation from that is exciting and an adventure filled expedition into a pork flavoured utopia. No! No, I say!  I refuse to allow the British Banger to be ruled by a factory standard, I reject the German Wurst being the gold class of sausage to which we must aspire and we must hold the Cumberland and Lincolnshire to the heavens to proclaim their Sovereign right! If we buy better, then every single sausage you eat will soon be a revelation. OK, so you might not be able to eat them twice a week but all the good things in life are worth waiting for. If we want to improve food standards, then we must vote with our forks! Buy better, comrades!!

#Ahem. Sorry, I got a bit jiggy there, I should be giving you the update of the day. An unsurprising breakfast of toast for the household followed by left over cous cous salad for Mrs P and I. We couldn't face the prospect of the cous cous by itself so I chopped some pepper and cucumber to try and alleviate the mouthfuls of dull. It certainly filled us up but neither Mrs P nor I actually finished our lunch boxes. If we are not salad people, then it must also be true that we are not cous cous people either.

Dinner was toad in the hole with onion and leek gravy, I had splashed out for a decent pack of sausages - must resist rant - so they went into the pan for a quick brown before the temperature got whacked up and batter was pored over the top. Onions and leek were sweated with a bit of butter, then water is reduced down with half a stock cube. Is it ever going to be a masterchef winner? Was the batter as good as I've ever produced? No and no, but it was still damn tasty.