I have a serious problem with arranging the food on a plate for photos when I’m hungry. Ideally I would just toss a bunch of veg and couple sausage, and start eating before it gets cold, and I go really frustrated trying to make some kind of aesthetic composition on the plate. Sometimes it finishes like this.

I’m still far away from professional food composition, but I hate cold food. So please bear with me if you feel embarrassed with this veg and sausage set up. Just double the portion of veggies and imagine me running with the fork, so I can finally grab a seat at the table and start eating. Yes, I was very hungry on that day 🙂

But. I really like this kind of meals, where you have all ingredients separately. I could make a mix of all veggies with sliced sausage, but I was smuggling some potatoes for my partner, so I sectioned everything on the baking tray, making sure that I won’t get any potatoes by mistake. Yeah, my partner is taking a keto break, but I feel like sooner or later (rather sooner) he will decide to get back on ketogenic track. Anyway, if you like traybake of veggies mixed with sausages, make some mess.

I’m not the biggest fan of sausages, the only one I like is the smoked ones from time to time. You can find smoked sausages in every Polish shop, and most of the popular supermarkets in UK. Look for the one that has a lot of meat in it, short list of ingredients, and as little as possible preservatives. The one that we like is a mix of pork and turkey meat (prepared with 80g of pork meat and 21g turkey meat per 100g of finished product) and only one preservative: sodium nitrite. Stay away from the one that are full of flour, artificial colours, starches, soya proteins and many preservatives.

I’ve also added couple unpeeled garlic cloves. If you’ve never tried baked garlic, you should definitely start adding it to your baked veggies and meats. It gets soft, buttery and sweet when caramelised. Garlic heaven! (check out my recipe for chicken baked with 40 cloves of garlic). If not that unfortunate potatoes I would add plenty of onion, but I haven’t been left with much room.

Anyway if you want something effortless, tasty and fun, grab couple smoked sausages, plenty of veggies, garlic (undoubtedly!), place them all on a baking tray, drizzle with some olive oil, sprinkle with herbs and pop into the oven. Get nice and crispy sausage and veggies, that are melting in you mouth. You can serve it with some low sugar ketchup, mustard or horseradish.

Yum!

smoked sausage traybake (ketofriendly)

INGREDIENTS (for two people):

• 300g smoked sausage
• 2 medium courgettes
• 1 large aubergine
• couple unpeeled garlic cloves
• some olive oil
• natural rock salt or sea salt flakes
• pinch of dried basil
• handful of cherry tomatoes (for baking or as I did – fresh)

DIRECTIONS

Preparations are as easy as it can be. Grab a large tray and place a piece of baking paper on it.

Take sausages, make small crosswise cuts, not very deep, to make kind of chequered pattern. Do it on both sides of each sausage.

Wash courgettes and aubergine and chop in smaller pieces, but don’t cut them very small. It will take about 40 minutes to bake the sausages, so we don’t want to burn veggies. Keep garlic unpeeled.

Place veggies, garlic and sausages on the tray, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle veggies with some dried basil and salt. If you like, also place cherry tomatoes. I’d rather like them fresh, but if you don’t mind baking them, do not hesitate.

Heat the oven to 200°C, and bake until veg and sausages are ready, it took me about 40 minutes. You can use grill function in the oven to sear the sausages slightly.

After baking place immediately on a plate and enjoy. You can serve it with low sugar ketchup, mustard or horseradish. After baking garlic is ready to be peeled, should be soft, buttery and slightly sweet when caramelised.

Enjoy!