Bangers and Mash

As we sat this afternoon talking about the Olympics, one child asked the usual "what's for dinner?". The Opening Ceremonies were scheduled for dinnertime, so someone else said "we should cook English food!". I searched around until I found something we all agreed sounded good. We all liked it!

Ingredients

8 large baking potatoes, peeled and quartered
2 tbs butter, divided
1/2 cup milk, or as needed
salt and pepper to taste

1 1/2 pounds beef sausage (we used bratwurst, as it's the best we could do)
1/2 cup diced onion
1 (.75 ounce) packet dry brown gravy mix
1 cup water, or as needed
Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Place potatoes in a saucepan with enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, and cook until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain, and mash with 1 teaspoon of butter, and enough milk to reach your desired creaminess. Continue mashing, or beat with an electric mixer, until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.

In a large skillet over medium heat, cook the sausage until heated through. Remove from pan, and set aside. Add remaining teaspoon of butter to the skillet, and fry the onions over medium heat until tender. Mix gravy mix and water as directed on the package, and add to the skillet with the onions. Simmer, stirring constantly, to form a thick gravy.

Pour half of the gravy into a square casserole dish so that is coats the bottom. Place sausages in a layer over the gravy (you can butterfly the sausages if you wish). Pour remaining gravy over them, then top with mashed potatoes.
Bake uncovered for 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until potatoes are evenly brown.

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Ice Cream Sauce

This is the perfect "hot fudge" type sauce. It's best served warm, and will turn into awesome chewy yumminess on your favorite ice cream! When cold, it's the consistency of fudge (fight over eating the leftovers with a spoon).

This recipe came about when I had the hankering for something chocolate-PB flavored and we had a bunch of ice cream in the freezer. I searched online for a good recipe but nothing really struck me. Then I remembered the frosting from my chocolate-cherry cake and how I always thought it would make good ice cream sauce. I used that recipe, making it a little thinner to use as sauce, and added the peanut butter. I used crunchy the first time I made it and it was amazing! I then tried it with creamy and it was just as good.

For the record, one of my kids doesn't like crunchy PB and was leery of that batch - but agreed that the nut chunks really made it.

We served it with banana slices and fresh cherries! Yum!!

Recipe:

1/3 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk

Bring these to a boil and simmer for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add:

1 cup chocolate chips
1/3 cup peanut butter

Stir until melted and completely incorporated.

Cool until just warm. Serve over your favorite ice cream.

Edit to ADD: We thought this would be great with butterscotch chips, but it really was WAY too sweet. I guess those chips are just sweeter than chocolate. I was going to try white chips, too. Someday I will play with it and see how to adapt the sugar - but it really needs the sugar for the texture, so I don't know.