Home Made Sausage Rolls

I've had this recipe for a few months and I finally tried it. 

Beef and sausage roll

Few people can resist the lure of crispy pastry! Add the savoury succulence of a herby sausage filling and you are onto a winner with the family. Sausage meat can be fatty and all meat is expensive. This super stretcher recipe combines lean beef mince with the sausage meat for a healthier option and stretches 500g of meat into 8-10 serves.

      250g sausage meat

      250g lean beef mince

      1 tsp mixed herbs

      1 onion, chopped

      2 medium potatoes, scrubbed and boiled till tender

      ¼ cup tomato sauce

      ¼ cup chutney

      2 sheets of frozen puff pastry or a block of pastry (home-made short crust will also work if you have no frozen pastry)

      1 egg for glazing - optional

Preheat the oven to 220°. Prepare the pastry by brushing a little water along one edge. Overlap the wet edge with the second sheet of pastry and press firmly (I roll over the join a few times with the rolling pin). If using block or home-made pastry roll it out to roughly 50cm long and 24cm wide.

Chop the onion and combine with the sausage meat, beef mince and herbs, this can be done in a food processor. Slice the cooked potatoes into ½ cm slices. Combine the chutney and tomato sauce.

Brush a little water down one long side of the pastry. Spread the sauce mixture over the pastry not quite to the edges. Form the meat mixture into a sausage shape down the middle of the pastry, flattening it slightly so it is compact. Place the potato slices on top of the sausage and carefully wrap the pastry around the filling. Stretch the pastry a little if you need to, to accommodate the filling. When you have joined the pastry along the length of the roll as best you can (don't worry if it's not perfect) carefully lift (using a long spatula) or slide the roll onto a greased baking tray, you may need to place it diagonally. Beat the egg lightly and brush over the pastry, then use a serrated knife such as a bread knife to cut slashes into the pastry top at 1 ½ - 2cm intervals. Bake in the preheated oven for 25-35 minutes or until pastry is a rich golden brown. Slice and serve hot or cold with vegetables or salad.

Cook's tips:

We get at least 8 adult serves (2 slices per person) from this when we serve it with side dishes. If you are feeding little people you'll get even more. If you don't want to waste an egg on 'glazing' the pastry, just brush it with milk.

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However, I'm a bugger for changing things around to make them more healthy, and doubling recipes so I'm not forever cooking, so I added a few veges, popped in a half a cup of finely ground oatmeal to compensate, mixed all the ingredients together and made them regular sausage roll size.

The filling turned out a little soft, even though I let it cook for a bit longer so maybe I should have added more oatmeal but possibly it was the sausage mince was too fatty.

Ah well, they taste nice and one half of the mix is curried so there's a bit more variety :)! Shame the poor light doesn't make them look as good as they taste.

Cheers, Rob xo.

Mystery Box reveal

Well, I finally had time to play with what was in the mystery box. The dyes, scent and cocoa butter and the sphere mold in the last picture.

 I'll obviously need more practice and there's more than one way to do this but I'm happy with how the first try turned out :). I painted the inside of the molds and poured the warm soap into them. Had a mild panic attack when the pigments bled and I could see colour in the bottom of the soap but it subsided as they cooled. The dragonflies are supposed to be purple with pale yellow wings! Need to do more research/experimenting in that department! Maybe colouring the soap mix is the thing to do.

The soaps on ropes should be nice and hard by Christmas and I can hand paint them with the pigments before then and give as gifts, except the defective one! I'll have to trial the painted soap to see if they run and how much. As they are approved cosmetic pigments they are deemed safe but a soap which colours the bathwater may cause a ruckus with one mother I know so uncoloured soaps will be the solution there. The ones below are cocoa butter soaps and those next to the mold,  are ordinary olive and rice bran oil soaps - before trimming.

All these are scented to some degree with cinnamon leaf oil as it has anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties. There's probably not enough to be an effective germ solution when washing but I was more concerned with the soap itself going off as, unlike commercial soap, there are no preservatives in this. Cinnamon is also an inhalant for colds and more appealing than tea tree or eucalyptus so it will serve multiple purposes in the soap.



I'll continue to experiment with my soapmaking with scents, colours and molds but the standard will always be Rhonda's recipe on the DTE blog . I have used soap made from Rhonda's recipe for washing dishes, making laundry wash and washing myself, including my hair, and it has never failed me. Sometimes basic is best even if variations are good for a change :)!

Cheers,
Robyn xo