Student Suppers for The Co-op: Sausage Meatball & White Bean Stew + 10% Off Your Grocery Shop For All Students

I promise you all it was not my intention to post one dish, student friendly sausage recipes two Mondays in a row. This does in no way reflect my sausage eating habits! However, when The Co-op got in touch to tell me about how they have partnered up with NUS to offer all students 10% off their grocery shop, and asked me if I wanted to put together a recipe for them featuring a student ‘kitchen hack’ to celebrate this I instantly thought of my Sausage Meatball & White Bean Stew. Some of my longer suffering readers might recognise this as one of the very first recipes I featured on this blog way back in 2012, but I’ve been wanting to give it a bit of an update. It is a great student budget easy dish, and my photography back then was terrible! 

I think the kitchen hack in this is fantastic, and makes your life so much easier if you are pushed for time, cheaper and especially if you are, like a lot of students a total kitchen novice. To make meatballs, you have to blend mince with flavourings and spices, and egg and breadcrumbs. Right? Well, yes you do. But all of that has already been done for you in a sausage, so did you know if you buy a packet of sausages, cut the end of a sausage casing and squeeze out the meat, you’ll have enough meat from one regular sized sausage to make three meatballs? All you need to do is roll and bake if you are doing them Swedish style, or roll, brown in a frying pan of oil, then add to a hot simmering sauce to cook through. Simple! You can also buy rolls of sausage meat meant for making scotch eggs and the like for this. I originally discovered this kitchen hack from BBC Good Food’s little student cookbook my parents gave me when I got into university way back when, and where this recipe is adapted from, but it is something I’ve also seen Nigella do a couple of times too.

Unintentionally here there is also another kitchen hack I discovered when I could not get the ingredients I wanted. I live above a small local edition of one of the big supermarkets, which is great when I have forgotten to pick up an ingredient at the market, I can just pop down in the middle of cooking. Problem is, they don’t always have everything. Like, for example when I headed down there in the middle of making this I’d found there was a gaping hole on the shelf where the parsley normally sat. But the parsley really adds flavour to this recipe. Where was I going to get the colour and kick from? In this photo you’ll see rocket (arugula) chopped up as if they were herbs, and it worked beautifully.

Sausage Meatball & White Bean Stew

• Author: Rachel Phipps
• Prep Time: 15 minutes
• Cook Time: 55 minutes
• Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
• Yield: Serves 4
• Category: Student

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Ingredients

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• 1 Pack 6 Pork Sausages
• 1 tbsp Mild Frying Olive Oil
• 2 Onions, finely chopped
• 2 Carrots, finely chopped
• 2 Large Garlic Cloves, finely chopped
• 2 Tins Tomatoes
• 2 Tins Haricot (Great Northern) Beans 
• 500ml (2 cups) Chicken Stock
• 85g (3 oz) Dried Fusilli Pasta Shapes
• Sea Salt
• Freshly Ground Black Pepper
• Handful Chopped Flatleaf Parsley or Rocket

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Instructions

1. As per my instructions above, make meatballs out of the sausages and fry them in a deep frying pan in the oil until browned. Set them aside to drain on kitchen towel. (I have an older version of this Jamie Oliver by Tefal pan and it is simply fantastic.)
2. In the same pan and remaining oil over a medium heat gently fry off until soft the carrot and onion, then add the garlic and cook until that is soft too.
3. Add the tinned tomatoes and the stock, season well, bring to the boil then reduce down to a simmer for 10 minutes.
4. Add the pasta and meatballs and cook until the pasta is tender.
5. Add the beans and cook until they have heated through.
6. Check the seasoning, then serve with a generous sprinkling of parsley or chopped rocket. 

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