appetizers and breakfast

I am a great fan of multi-purpose things.

My couch is also a bed. My coffee table is also storage. My appetizers are also breakfast.

I haven't been able to find a local bakery that makes good sausage rolls. In fact, of all the bakeries I've been to, I found only one that had sausage rolls. They weren't very good. I mean really, how can you mess up something that is basically "pigs in a blanket"?

I'm most familiar with sausage rolls eaten at lunch or as an afternoon snack, with tea. But I've also had small versions of them as cocktail foods. And since I'm somewhat recently enamoured with biscuits and sausage gravy, I figure we may as well have them for breakfast too.

Because really, who wants to make breakfast the morning after a cocktail party. Or a family Christmas party.... I need cocktails for those.

Sausage Rolls

What you need:

• Biscuit dough!
• Sausage
• ...
• that's basically it
• but dijon mustard is tasty
• and egg wash makes them pretty (one egg with half a shell's worth of water beaten in)

(but of course, there is no egg in the picture)

What you gotta do:

Make yourself a batch of biscuit dough. I'm going to do these rolls two ways, so I've divided mine in half and rolled out one of the halves into a rectangle that's about 10 inches long and 4 inches wide.

For the first batch, I'm going to start with raw sausage. Whatever kind you like best. These came from a local deli/grocery that makes their own sausages, usually with local pigs. If you have time and want to dirty another bowl, you can mix in some breadcrumbs and extra seasoning (sage, parsley, thyme). I opted to go bare bones with my sausage and just brush the dough with a bit of grainy dijon mustard.

Bust open a sausage and place a thumb-thick strip of sausage a little closer to one edge.

I brushed a bit of egg wash on the inside of the dough before I rolled it up.

Slice the roll into 10 pieces that are about 1 inch wide each and once they're on a baking sheet, brush them with more egg wash. 

Into a 400 degree oven they go. Mine's been preheating this whole time. Has yours?

And since my biscuits tend to rise quite a bit...

Some of them toppled, but 25 minutes later they came out looking just fine.

Now, if you've got some leftover sausage, or if you don't want to deal with the raw, you can do this all with cooked sausage.

Again, roll out a piece of biscuit dough. This one didn't quite make it into being rectangular. Close enough.

The mustard and egg wash go on first, then the sausage. I cut into the sausage in a couple places so that it would lay a little straighter.

Roll, slice, eggwash.

This time, I baked a little hotter, 425 degrees which is typical for biscuits, and only left them in for 20 minutes.

These, with a bit of gravy on top... breakfast.

Or dipped into a little more dijon... appetizers.

What's your favourite multi-purpose food?

I almost know what I'm doing

What goes with eggnog?

Mincemeat pies. Um, sorta mincemeat. And kinda not really a pie.

Proper 'mincemeat' really does have meat in it. In fact, the picadillo I stuffed into poblano peppers is more like traditional mincemeat than this filling is, but I've never been one for tradition. I am firmly of the opinion that "it's always been done this way" is the best reason to do it another way.

And so I stuffed biscuit dough with fruit.

(first eggnog, now mincemeat... almost seems like we're actually on top of a holiday for once)

Minced Fruit Pasties (or Turnovers, if you prefer)

What you need:

• 1 recipe's worth of biscuit dough or biscuit dough
• 2.5 small wrinkly apples, or about that much apple
• a few dried pears (or apricots, or some other fruit)
• 1/2 c dates
• zest from one orange
• 1/2 inch ginger
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp cinnamon sugar (or cinnamon and sugar to make that amount)
• 1 tsp vanilla (you can use some kind of booze here if you'd like)
• 1 egg

What you gotta do:

I had a few apples in the fruit basket that have been there for way too long. I once read "wisened" as a description for apples, and I think that's what these ones were. Fresh crisp ones would work fine too, but if you've got a couple old ones sitting around... (anyone seeing my inspiration for this recipe?)

Put your grater into a medium sized bowl, and start grating apples. Peel them? What? Why? I rarely see any reason to peel apples. The peel is completely edible, doesn't taste bad, and will add colour to things if it's red. Plus, that's extra work.

Zest the orange on a microplane grater, and then use it for the ginger. Microplanes are great for ginger.

Chop whatever dried fruit you're using into small chunks. If you've got some candied orange peel, that would work too.

My butter and cinnamon sugar are already combined, leftover from the cinnamon buns, but yours should go in now, separately if that's how they are.

Vanilla too. Or booze, your call.

Now, the dates. You can pre-chop these if you want, but dates are pretty easy to mash, so I just dumped mine in whole and went at them with a wooden spoon.

If you don't happen to have a batch of biscuit dough in the fridge because you made a double when you did yesterday's cinnamon biscuit buns for brunch, you'll have to make some.

If you do: handy! Roll it out into a rectangle.

I cut mine into 9 pieces; the pieces were the right size (about 5x5 inches), but this only makes filling for 6. I'm sure you can find something to stuff into those biscuits. A bit of sausage would be nice... Sausage biscuit rolls!

Drop a couple or three tablespoons of the filling mixture on one side of a biscuit square, and spread it out into a triangle-ish shape. No meat, but it kinda looks like there is...

Don't get too close to the edge. Fold the other half of the dough over the filling to make a triangle.

Starting at one of the corner points, lift the bottom dough and stretch-fold-roll it over the top dough. Biscuit dough is sticky enough that you shouldn't need any water or egg to make the edges stick, but if yours aren't sticking, water will help.

Stretch-fold-roll your way toward the point, then stretch-fold-roll along to the other corner.

Apparently I took no pictures of this process.

When you're done, they should look something like these:

Brush them with an egg with a tsp of water beaten into it.

Cut a slit or two in the top so steam can escape. If you to this, you are less likely to have filling explode out of the side. You can dust the tops with sugar too if you'd like.

Bake them at 400 for about 20 minutes.

I'm still working the kinks out of my new oven, but I'm pretty sure I was around 400, and mine only took 18 minutes.

They'll be lovely and shiney and golden when they're done.

And some of them will have strangely face-like features.

Tasty served with morning coffee, afternoon tea, or a glass of evening eggnog.

Stick around. We are actually going to pull off some holiday shit this year. Taneasha's thinking sweets, and I'll be making small things you can eat with one hand.

Maybe one day I'll get back to writing things you want to read with only one hand... ;)