Last week we were craving sausage rolls. I don't believe that I had ever tasted a sausage roll prior to coming here to the UK.
My mother used to make weiner rolls when I was growing up. They were something we all loved as a family.
Mom made beautiful plain pastry. It wasn't puff pastry, just plain. All of her pies, etc. were beautiful and we loved them.
When she made weiner rolls she would make her regular pastry recipe and then roll it out. The rolled pastry would be cut into rectangles large enough to wrap around weiners, enclosing them completely.
You can even get Vegetarian ones. Both are wrapped in flaky puffed pastry. Of course you get what you pay for.
The more expensive ones will have a lovely rich and ample meaty filling. Using a quality sausage meat. The cheap ones will be mostly pastry and filled with nasty sausage meat. People seem to enjoy both.
The first time I tasted a homemade one was at my friend Joy's in South Wales. They were magnificent. It truly was love at first bite.
You can find her recipe here. She was really generous and shared it with me. I think she also sent us home with a bag filled with them that visit along with her gorgeous lamb samosas!
This recipe for Apple & Sage Sausage Rolls was one I had clipped from the BBC Good Food Magazine back in 2012. I had saved it in my recipe files to bake one day.
I discovered it while going through them the other day and thought that there would be no time like the present to make them. I had puff pastry and sausage meat in the freezer that I needed to use up.
The directions were a bit ambiguous. I have tried to make them as straight forward as I can, as well as adding my usual North American measurements.
Try to use the best sausage meat that you can afford. I actually did a tutorial on making your own sausages here.
I know you won't be able to get British Sausages in North America. You can however make some tasty sausage meat yourself. I highly recommend it. They are really delicious.
You only need the meat to make the filling for these sausage rolls. It is mixed with chopped fresh sage and apple. I peeled the apple.
I used French all-butter puff pastry that I had in the freezer. If you can find all-butter puff pastry, I really recommend it.
I always think it is best to use natural ingredients whenever you can. I don't like things with artificial ingredients and preservatives. Go as pure as you can.
Apple & Sage Sausage Rolls
Ingredients
- 400g (16 ounces) of sausage meat (from about 6 meaty sausages)
- 1 clove of garlic crushed
- 2 TBS chopped sage
- 1 apple, peeled and chopped
- 1 pound (500g) all butter puff pastry
- 1 free range egg beaten together wih 1 tsp water
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 220*C/425*F/ gas mark 7. Line several baking trays with baking paper.
- Remove the sausage meat from the skins and crumble into a bowl. Add the chopped sage, garlic and chopped apple. Mix well together.
- Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a large rectangle. 12 inches wide at the shortest edge. Halve the pastry to make two long thin sheets. Divide the sausage meat down the centre of each, leaving a good border on both sides.
- Beat the egg together with the water. Brush some of this down both long edges of each pastry strip. Fold over the edges to cover the sausage meat, making two long rolls. Seal the edges with a fork.
- Flip over and place pastry seam side down on the baking sheets. Brush more egg wash over top. Cut each roll into six equal pieces. Snip each in a few places and spread them apart on the baking sheets to leave room to rise.
- Cook for 25 minutes until golden brown and puffed.
One thing I will miss about the UK are the lovely sausages they have over here. There are about as many varieties of sausage as there are areas and counties.
Nevermind, they have good ones in Canada as well! There will always be things we miss about the places we have lived.
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
There is something really comforting about a good banana bread. I have baked many through the years and have my favourites. Family Favourite Banana Bread and Rich Banana Bread are two of my absolute favourites.
The family favourite recipe is one I baked for my family for many years. It is moist and delicious. The rich banana bread recipe is the banana bread I used to bake for the Mr when I worked at the manor down south. He had to have a loaf of it baked for him every week! It is also moist and delicious.
Big Banana breads just are not practical in this house these days. I know I could freeze them but for me something is lost in the flavour when something is frozen. Maybe it is just in my head, I don't know for sure.
This recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Bread for Two solves that problem. It makes one small Banana Bread, 5 1/2 by 3 inches in size. It is perfectly sized for the smaller family.
This loaf may be small in stature, but it is big on flavour. It lacks nothing in the least of its much larger counterpart!
It is rich, moist, and delicious. There is only a tiny bit of fat in the form of 1 TBS of unsalted butter, melted. This is great because you end up with a bread that is not oily or greasy in the least. Too many banana breads can end up this way. Blech!
It uses one small banana, about 1/4 cup of mashed banana. This means that there is plenty of banana flavour in this loaf.
The abundance of natural sugars in bananas are the secret to a moist and delicious Banana Bread. Make sure your bananas are nice and ripe before you use them in a banana bread.
Ideally they should be starting to soften. The skin should be well spotted with brown flecks of colour. The more brown flecks the better!
I have used bananas to make banana bread that most people would throw away. I am talking just about black in colour skin-wise. They make the best banana breads.
They mash beautifully and are the sweetest! Seriously! I am a person who hates chunks of banana in my banana bread.
I want a smooth texture without lumps of banana. I do like toasted nuts in it, but no banana lumps! I am funny that way.
If you use yellow not-so-ripe bananas they just won't work right. They just don't have the sweetness and flavour of their over-ripe counterparts!
They can even remain quite starchy after baking! This is a big No No! There are a lot of theories out there about how to ripen bananas.
One of the best ways it to place them into a paper bag and shut it up, leaving them in there for a few days. This is the most effective method.
It does the job best. The bag traps the ethyene gas produced by ripening fruit. This in turn helps to speed up the process from the normal time of just leaving them on the counter-top. You will find you only need a day or two!
I like toasted walnuts in my banana bread. Banana and walnuts just are perfect partners. You could also use pecans. The Mr down south liked toasted pecans over walnuts.
I like both, but prefer the walnuts. I get that from my dad. He is nuts about walnuts as well! And of course as I tell you frequently, toasting your nuts just makes them nuttier!
I guess that means I will have to cut back on my peanut butter and toast supper. Most nights that is what I have for my supper. A slice of toast spread with peanut butter.
Not a good thing in the long run I guess. Bad news for me who always has said that if I was marooned on a desert island I would want a jar of peanut butter and potatoes with me. Ho hum . . .
Banana Chocolate Chip Bread for Two
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (70g) all purpose/plain flour
- 1/4 cup (30g) toasted and chopped walnuts
- 2 TBS good quality dark milk chocolate, grated or cut into chunks (I use Green & Black's)
- 1/4 cup (50g) sugar
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1 small ripe banana, peeled and mashed really well (about 1/4 cup)
- 1 large free range egg, at room temperature
- 1 TBS unsalted butter, melted and cooled
- 1 TBS plain yogurt
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180*C.350*F/ gas mark 4. Butter a 5 1/2 by 3 inch loaf tin and line with baking paper.
- Whisk the flour, chocolate, walnuts, sugar, soda and salt together in a medium bowl.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted and cooled butter, bananas, egg, yogurt and vanilla.
- Gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry just to combine. Do not overmix. Spoon into the prepared pan, smoothing the top.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes until the loaf is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
- Let cool in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes before lifting out from the pan to cool completely. Leave to cool for one hour before slicing to serve.
I really hope that you will want to bake this Banana bread if you are in a small family, and if you are not, maybe you will enjoy one of the larger loaves that I have linked up to here. Also, if I was to small size another kind of quick bread, what would be your choice of smaller sized recipes you might like to see? I aim to please!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
One of my favourite things here in the UK has to be Mary Berry. I had never heard of her prior to moving over here. I think the only British chef I knew prior to moving here was Paul Rankin. I used to watch a show called Ready Steady Cook.
It had celebrity chef's on it, hosted by Ainsley Harriot ( another chef, who actually lives in Chester). The Chefs were Paul Rankin, James Martin, Anthony Worrall Thompson, Phil Vickery, Lesley Water's, Nick Nairn, and a few others. Those are the names I remember.
I had actually seen Paul Rankin on PBS tv prior to moving here where he was on an Irish cooking show and I actually got to meet him in person about 12 or 13 years ago when I was on another cooking show here in the UK.
I had always thought him to be tall, but he's not. Cute accent though and he thought my soup was gorgeous.
Mary Berry was not on that show. I first became acquainted with her when I bought her cake baking book, and of course she was in the BBC Good Food magazine quite frequently. Then of course The Great British Bake Off came along and now the whole world knows her!
I also got to meet Curtis Stone, Jean Christophe Novelli, Phil Vickery and Jamie Oliver through the years, not all at once.
I would have loved to meet Mary Berry, but instead I get to cook her recipes. I have never experienced a dud, which I can't say about some of the others!
I have been going through papers and things and found this recipe for Mary's Perfect Shortbread which I had pulled out of a magazine a while back. Easy Cook, but it doesn't say which year.
I thought this might be the only chance I have to bake them. I won't be able to bring anything with me for the most part when I move back to Canada, so I thought to myself better now than never!
Plus it is a horrible, rainy, wet and miserable day out there. I thought losing myself in a bit of shortbread was not entirely a bad way to spend part of the day!
Shortbread has to be one of the easiest biscuits/cookies to bake, but you can also get it very wrong. You need to handle the dough gently or you will make it tough.
You also have to make sure your hands are cool so that you don't melt the fat in the dough.
This means you need to work quickly when you are rubbing the butter into the flour. I always use cold butter, cutting it into bits and dropping it into the flour to rub it in.
You could also use a pastry blender or a food processor I suppose, but your fingers work really well. Just work quickly.
Pricking it all over with a fork once you have it rolled out and docked/fluted will ensure that any air caught in the pastry/dough will come out. This means that you won't end up with air bubbles in the shortbreads.
Also chilling it in the refrigerator prior to baking also helps to ensure a crisp finish. You don't need to chill it for long. Ten minutes will do fine.
You also want to score it with a sharp knife prior to baking. This recipe makes 8 wedges. What I do is to score it into quarters and the score each quarter in half. Works a charm.
Do not cut them all the way through or separate them. I fluted the edge all the way around with my finger tips and also marked it the tines of a fork. I think it came out quite pretty.
Some of you will want to know what castor sugar is. Castor sugar is a kind of granulated sugar which is used for baking here in the UK. I think it is very similar to fruit sugar in North America.
Our granulated sugar here is much coarser than North American sugar. Castor sugar is much finer. The reason that it is used for baking is because it melds into doughs and batters much faster.
You will find often here in the UK it is just stirred into batters and doughs because it melts so easily. It gives a smooth finish whereas regular granulated sugar might give a grainy finish, which is not very desirable.
You can easily make your own castor sugar by running you granulated sugar through a food processor to grind it down a bit, or in a spice grinder. What you don't want is to grind it to a powder!
Once the shortbreads come out of the oven you will need to score them again, while they are still warm. This time cut the all the way through to the bottom with a sharp knife. That way they won't break unevenly or crumble apart when it comes time to serve them.
Again, the perfect finish. Its little things like this. Handy little tips that make all the difference in the world. Especially when it comes to presentation!
So there you have it Mary's Perfect Shortbreads. You can't go wrong!! (Christmas is coming!! Perfect for tea parties also!)
Mary's Perfect Shortbread
Ingredients
- 1 cup less 2 TBS (125g) plain flour
- 6 1/2 TBS (60g) cornflour (cornstarch)
- 1/2 cup plus 2 tsp (125g) butter
- 5 TBS (60g) castor sugar, plus more for sprinkling (fine granulated sugar)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 160*C/325*F/ gas mark 3.
- Sift the cornflour and flour into a bowl. Rub the butter into the mixture with your fingertips until it resembles fine crumbs. Stir in the sugar. Knead gently until it forms a smooth dough. Shape into a round flat disk.
- Place onto a sheet of baking parchment. Using a rolling pin, roll it out to a disc which is 7 inches in diameter. (18 cm) Gently lift the baking parchment onto a baking sheet. Using your fingers crimp around the edges and prick all over with a fork. Using a sharp knife, score it lightly with a sharp knife into 8 even wedges.
- Chill until firm.
- Bake in the oven for 35 minutes until the shortbread is a pale golden colour. Mark the wedges again and dust lightly with more caster sugar.
- Leave to cool on the baking tray for five minutes, then carefully lift off to cool completely on a wire rack.
- Cut into wedges to serve.
notes:
This recipe was adapted from one found in Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook. You cannot beat Mary Berry for sound, good, fail-proof recipes! These shortbreads are excellent!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
The most common result of this is a burger that is super thick when it is done. I don't like super thick burgers. A certain amount of thickness is to be expected, but I like to be able to get my mouth around what I am eating.
One way to prevent this is to make sure that the middle of your patties is much thinner than the edges when you are shaping them. You can even make a little divit in the middle about the size of a North American quarter or a one pound coin.
This usually works really well. Just be careful that you leave enough turkey covering the butter so that it doesn't all melt out and disappear. You want that butter inside flavouring and moistening the meat.
You can use whatever buns you like. I am a fan of the brioche bun myself. Toasted. I just pop them under the grill until they are golden. I don't like using untoasted buns as they fall apart.
Once your buns are toasted and your burgers are cooked all you have to do is to decide what it is you want to garnish your burger with.
I like to have a slice of cheese melted on the top of mine, glutton that I am. Today I used a Swiss type of cheese. Swiss melts wonderfully and I find burger slices over here have a funny, almost powdery taste that I don't like at all.
I like lettuce and tomato with my burger. I prefer the darker green lettuce, so I use a few leaves of romaine. I, personally, think the flavour of iceberg gets lost in a burger, although I know that is what most people use.
Today I had a yellow beef-steak tomato which I sliced up to put into the burger. I am not sure it tasted as good as a red tomato would taste, but it is all that I had.
Usually I will add mayonnaise of some sort or ranch dressing on the bottom half of the bun as well. If I am using just mayo I might also add some cranberry sauce. Today I had none. *sniff *sniff*
Herbed Turkey Burger
Ingredients
- 1 TBS extra virgin olive oil
- 1 small red onion, peeled and minced
- 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and minced
- 1/2 pound ground turkey breast meat
- 1/2 pound ground turkey thigh meat
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
- 3 TBS chopped fresh flat leaf parsley
- 1/2 TBS minced fresh rosemary leaves
- 1/2 TBS minced fresh sage leaves
- 1 tsp chopped fresh thyme leaves
- 2 TBS butter, divided into 4 flat pieces
- 4 slices of swiss cheese
- toasted burger buns
- sliced tomatoes, onions, lettuce
- mayonnaise
- ranch dressing
- Dijon mustard
- relish and or pickles
- ketchup
- cranberry sauce
- crisp bacon
Instructions
- Heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add the onions and saute until softened. Add the garlic and cook until the mixture becomes fragrant. Set aside and allow to cool.
- Crumble both ground turkey meats into a bowl. Mix together. Add the onion mixture and all of the fresh herbs and seasoning. Gently mix everything together until all are evenly distributed.
- Divide into four equally sized balls. Place 1/2 TBS butter in the centre of each ball and flatten into a patty around the butter. Try to get as flat a patty as possible. As the meat cooks it will shrink up and you don't want them to end up being too thick.
- Heat lightly greased grill or skillet. Cook the burgers for 5 to 6 minutes per side until cooked through. The internal temperature will read 74*C/165*F. Lay a slice of cheese on top of each and allow it to melt.
- Serve hot on toasted buns with your favourite burger toppings/condiments.
So what are your favourite kinds of burgers? Do you prefer Beef or Turkey? Maybe you can't stand either one? What are your favourite toppings on any burger??? I really want to know!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
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