Sausage and mash with marsala gravy

Matt here,

This is a great weekday meal, it requires a bit of time - maybe an hour or so - but it's definitely worth the effort. Yep, I can say with some confidence that Jen would agree that it's worth the effort. I would caution though, that this is about as sweet as savoury food gets.

The inspiration for this was undoubtedly some amalgamation of the combined weight of my cookery book reading. I would say it rests in the Nigel Slater/Nigella Lawson camp though, mainly for the abuse of cream...
But the real driving force behind this meal was my nerdy fascination with frying onions, slowly, in butter. The sausages were just an excuse to justify taking time over turning onions from crunchy tear inducers to melt-in-the-mouth strips of caramel sugariness. The amount of marsala feels a little on the decadent side but it's essential for depth and richness.

Ingredients:
The best sausages that you can find (two per person)
One and a half onions per person
Butter
Olive oil
Marsala, a large glass full
Marscarpone (two large spoons), or an unhealthily large pouring of cream

And for the mash:
Enough potatoes
Mustard
More cream
More butter
Parsley
Salt and Pepper

Method:

1. Melt a slab of butter with some olive oil in a heavy based frying pan.
2. Get the sausages frying to give them a bit of colour
3. Slice the onions fairly thinly, about pound coin thickness and throw them in the pan.
4. Keep things stirring from time to time but let the onions stick a lttle
5. Stir some more, this probably takes about 30 minutes - if you like, you can move all the sausages to one side of the pan and all the onions to the other, this lets you get more colour on the sausages if you need to...
6. During this time get the potatoes boiling for the mash.
7. When the onions are browning nicely, and the sausages are cooked, remove the sausages to a plate and throw a full glass of Marsala into the pan, scrape up all of the bits stuck to the bottom of the pan, set fire to it if you like.
8. Turn the heat right down and add the cream or marscarpone and stir in. Check for seasoning.
9. Add back the sausages and give them a generous coating of the sauce. You can leave them like this for a few minutes while you finish the mash with lots of cream, butter and some mustard and freshly chopped parsley.
10. Pile the mash decoratively on a plate and then add the sausages and some sauce.
11. Enjoy!