Advent calendar: 21. Sausage rolls

OK it will soon be Christmas day and I’m only on post 21 of my advent calendar. Shamefully, five of them were posted today. I don’t care. It’s still lots of posts that I may not have made otherwise, and none of them (in my admittedly biased opinion) were drivel for the sake of a post. Well, maybe apart from one.

ANYWAY. Right now I am going to tell you how to make my favourite sausage rolls. These are a Christmas treat, I love them and hope you do too.

Ingredients

Sausage meat – the quantity that you usually get when you ask for sausage meat.
A smallish onion
An apple. A normal apple. Not a big one.
Puff pastry. I used 1.5 pre-rolled sheets yesterday.
An eggwash or equivalent.
General cupboard essentials like oil, butter, sage, thyme, pepper, etc.

Method

If the puff pastry is in the freezer, get it out. In fact, get it out anyway as it’s much more pliable at room temperature. Your oven should be on, at about 180 or the equivalent that you undoubtably know should you need it.

Chop the onion. I like to chop it into tiny little pieces, like 2mm max. But I’m annoying like that.

Chuck the onion in a frying pan with some olive oil. Bung in a good blob of butter. Soften the onions. Don’t burn them – or at least, if you do, chuck them out and start again like I did yesterday. Wipe out the pan so it doesn’t taste of burn.

Chop the apple. Again, I do this in tiny pieces, but you may not be as fussy as me.

Add the apple to the nicely softened, goldening onions. Stir around. There should be plenty enough oil and butter left to coat the apple nicely. If not, bung in some more butter. It can’t hurt.

If you got a Lincolnshire type sausage mix with herbs already added, you may want to miss this step, but here I grate in loads of black pepper and add sage and thyme.

Get a nice bowl, and put all your sausage meat in. Add the onion and apple mix. Stir. Realise that the wooden spoon you chose is not up for the job and get your grubby mits in on the action. Molest until fully mixed.

Unroll the puff pastry. Get a knife (or some scissors) and cut it into thirds. Put some sausage meat into the middle of each. I put enough in to take up about a third of the width of the pastry. If you’re not sure, err on the side of stingy.

Roll them up. Squish the edges together. Stab them a bit, because the steam will want to escape, and you’d rather it chose a stab hole to do so than the pinched together edge.

Put on a baking tray, give them an eggwash, and shove in the oven. Check at around 20 minutes. You want them to look on the brown side of golden. It will probably take 35 minutes, so obsessively check for the next quarter of an hour.

Take them out. Remember to let them cool before you demolish them, because they will burn the hell out of your mouth otherwise. These are also nice cold, later, so don’t worry about them. Make lots. Oh, you might want to cut them into smaller portions to make them go further, especially if for whatever reason you intend to share.

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