Hot sausage and mustard!

Sadly no pease pudding and saveloys on the menu this week... well actually not sadly in the case of the saveloy as I'm never entirely sure what they're made of. I know I could Google, but quite frankly I just don't dare!

As I mentioned previously I was out for the whole day on Monday, and needed to take a packed lunch and tea as a train with hundreds of Brownies isn't likely to have somewhere to buy coffee on board which is my usual fuel of choice when proper eating isn't an option. As mentioned in my previous post, I had cooked/ made/ baked (??) the Nigella ham for sandwiches, I also packed some yoghurt and stewed fruit and a large bottle of water. This left me a small dilemma of what to have for the tea part of the equation - I couldn't face sandwiches again, but knew I would need something. There's no way soup would stay hot in a flask all day (mind you I shall doubtlessly bore you with my quest for a flask that actually keeps soup hot another day) and although I toyed with the idea of a pasta salad, I neither the ingredients nor the desire for one. A friend who's also a Guider mentioned that she would often take a Cornish pasty on days when she's out all day and may need more than a lunch, for the same reason as pasties were invented, they are their own plate, you don't require cutlery and they are a whole meal (I do sometimes wonder how one that was split as traditional with a savoury and sweet filling would taste). However, as regular readers will know I'm a bit dubious about meat that comes already in things, so was intially planning on making my own. A desire to be thrifty (it just sounds so much better than broke doesn't it?) meant that I poked around in the freezer and realised I had the ingredients for sausage rolls which made that decision for me.

So sausage rolls it was. I was using bought pastryInitially I was tempted to split my sausages (Morrison's 'The Best' pork sausages, which were originally bought while reduced and promptly frozen) and then just put them in the puff pastry, but dug out a Jamie Oliver recipe, that suggested adding grated lemon zest and herbs, I had a potter around the very wet garden and snipped off some sage. I chopped up the sage leaves and mushed the sausagemeat and spicing in. I then rolled this into sausage shapes and laid it down the middle of the rolled out puff pastry. I then wrapped the pastry over the sausagemeat, sealing it with some beaten egg, and pressing the seal down with the back of a fork. I then eggwashed the sausage roll, chopped each roll into 4 peices, and baked then in a 200 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Now, I know as well as you do that sausage rolls are hardly haute cuisine, and even the most basic cook could assemble them without a recipe, but as they are what I spent part of my Sunday making, and I wanted to blog them, because simple they may be, but home made means you know what is in them and in that way if nothing else they have to be better gor you than shop bought. The light buttery pastry, and the simple flavour of the pork that is lifted by the addition of lemon and sage make these incredibly tasty and a fantastic addition to a packed lunch (or tea!)