Here's How It's Done:
Take 500g of good pork sausages. High meat content please.
1 large cooking apple. Or sharp eating apple. Chopped small.
1 tblsp. brown chutney/pickle. I used Sainsburys regular Branston style chutney.
The last bits of any other chutney you find lurking in the fridge. I used some Onion relish.
Plenty of black pepper, a little salt.
14oz of either homemade Puff Pastry or shop bought. Whatever make life easier.
Roll out pastry. 14 x 11.
Mix all the filling ingredients and with floured hands, form into a log shape.
Place meat down the centre of pastry and make 6 diagonal cuts through the pastry on either side about 2 ins apart and within 1 in of the sos mix.
Brush edges of pastry with beaten egg then alternately cross the pastry strips over the meat to form a PLAIT. ( You still with me?)
Brush with beaten egg and decorate if you have to, with pastry off-cuts. Bit daft but it's great to play. I cut out discs with the metal top from a bottle of cooking wine:)
Pop onto miserly greased baking sheet then place in hot oven gas 7 for about 45 minutes. Keep an eye on it but don't go overboard, you want the pastry to rise after all. If you keep peeping and checking and checking and peeping the plait will be flat.
I served this up to Mother and Mr Horsehound with a few unpeeled boiled buttered potatoes and can of marrowfat peas.
Sauces, gravies and other drippy stuffs weren't needed.
This thing is delicious hot but equally scrummy served cold with ketchup or mustards. Ideal picnic fare for long summer days sitting on blanketless grass.
Slow baked underneath was a Big Bread Pudding.... the very stuff of warm and welcoming kitchens.
P.S. This afternoon was a busy one for me what with cooking and filling in forms but somehow I managed to scrape in a sneaky twenty minute coffee break in the conservatory where I started on my NEW Stephen King book.
Methinks think I'm going to like it:)
Till the morrow....
Goodnight All.
