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?

skinned alive

At least I think I'm still alive.

I've never had a semester with such a brutal exam schedule. But, it's over. And I think my GPA made it out relatively unscathed.

I on the other hand am exhausted, brain dead, and ready to sleep for a week. But first, dinner:

I'm very much a fan of finger foods. No cutlery to wash. And since it's the time of year for entertaining (apparently in December, most people get to go to parties, and don't have to do metric shittonnes of calculus) I made an appetizer for dinner.

Fast enough that you can make them long after the guests arrive, easy enough that you can make them long after the first bottle of wine is empty, and tasty enough that you won't have to figure out what to do with the leftovers.

Potato Skins

What you need:

• 4 small baker potatoes
• 1 c grated cheddar
• 3 strips very crispy bacon
• 2 green onions
• 1/2 jalapeno (or a few rings of the pickled ones)

What you gotta do:

We at authorskitchen do not typically advocate cooking anything in the microwave, but there have been times when we've had to. And times when we totally regretted it. But when you're whipping up an appetizer for hungry guests, or brain dead engineering students, baking a potato in the microwave just really doesn't seem that bad.

Just make sure you poke holes in them first.

Mine took about 12 minutes, but I did them in 4 minute increments. 4 minutes seems a reasonable increment.

They will be making steamy noises and will give under pressure if you squeeze them.

Set these aside and let them cool while you chop the onions, crumble the bacon, grate the cheese, and preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Once the potatoes are cool enough that you can hold them in your hand without wanting to toss them across the room at someone, roll them around on the counter or baking sheet first though to see which are their flat sides. Cut them in half so that the halves rest on the flat sides.

Remove the potato innards with a small spoon. Leave a bit of an edge and enough on the bottom so that the filling will have something to sit on.

Toss the cheese, bacon, etc. together and then divide it up between the skins. They will seem full, but trust me, they're not. I think about 1.5 times the amount of stuff I put in these, would be ideal.

They only need about 7 minutes to bake.

Bacon, melted cheese, eat with your hands. Perfect.

I imagine most Americans will want to dip these in ranch dressing (srsly guys, what's with the fucking ranch on everything?) but I like a bit of sour cream spiked with some hot sauce.

And there you go, less than 30 minutes and you've got tasty cups filled with bacon and cheese.

What more could anyone want?