Wow! Christmas, pre during and post, was BUSY! Lots of time spent celebrating the holidays with family, and mostly by eating, marvellous 🙂 So rather than dwell on how quiet this blog has been let’s just move swiftly along and greet the New Year with a new recipe! And what a fab new recipe it is too! I do like a cheeky pork pie, but Hubby isn’t a big fan of the jelly (understatement…), so when I saw this recipe in the Great British Food magazine I thought it might keep both of us happy.
I am happy to report that it most certainly did, and then some! They may not be picture perfect (somewhere Paul Hollywood is twitching and he doesn’t know why!) and half of my bluberries may have popped, but I love the homemadeyness of them all being a little uneven, and they were hella good fun to make 🙂 And the joy of readymade pastry makes this recipe a total doddle and something you can rustle up in a little under half an hour.
Any worries I might have had that the blueberries would be a little tart were for naught as they sweetened up perfectly when combined with the redcurrant jelly and were a wonderful counterpoint to the savouriness of the sausagemeat. Next time I make these I’m going to experiment with the filling… Our local butcher, Crombies, does an amazing pork and caramalised onion sasuage that I think would work an absolute treat! And! My sister in law gave me a bottle of her delicious homemade bramble vinegar which I’m going to sub in for the red wine vinegar as I think it’ll be amazing with the blueberries.
We ate half our batch for lunch, and popped the rest in the fridge to snack on. I suspect they won’t last the weekend…
- 65g dried sage and onion stuffing mix
- 500g readymade chilled shortcrust pastry
- flour for rolling or waxy baking parchment (really!)
- 3 spring onions, snipped into slices
- 400g good quality pork and herb sausages, poked out of their skins
- freshly ground black pepper
- 1 egg, beaten to glaze
- 175g blueberries
- 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 2 tbsp redcurrant jelly
- 1 tsp cornflour mixed with 1 tbsp water
- butter for greasing the muffin tin
- 11.5 cm biscuit cutter or small coffee cup saucer
- 12 section muffin tin
- Put the oven on and preheat to 180C/350C/Gas Mark 4. Lightly butter the muffin tin, including the areas around each of the muffin cups. Wash the spring onions.
- Start by making up the stuffing mix per your packet instructions – I used Paxo – and set to one side.
- Roll out your pastry, either on a floured surface or be sneaky like Hubby and snub flour completely by rolling your pastry out between two sheets of waxy baking parchment! Properly genius!! You’re aiming to get the pastry quite thin yet sturdy enough to hold the filling without breaking when they’re cooked and you’re gently wrestling them out of the muffin tin (can you tell I learnt this the hard way?!).
- Cut out 12 circles using the biscuit cutter/saucer, re-rolling the pastry until you have enough. Then gently press the pastry circles into the muffin tin (using the ball end of the rolling pin to lightly poke them in works a treat) so that the pastry stands a little above the top of the tin in a wavy edge. Set to one side.
- Snip the spring onions into your mixing bowl and then snap on the CSI vinyl gloves and get the sausages! Using scissors or a sharp knife, cut a slit up the length of the sausage skin and then poke all the sausagemeat out into the bowl with the spring onions. Give it a good few grinds of fresh black pepper (since the sausages were seasoned before they were cased you shouldn’t need to add any salt) and then get your hands in there and mix it all up. Tip the stuffing in and mix that all in too.
- Divide your sausagemeat mixture between each of the pastry cases, using the back of a spoon to even them out.
- Brush the top edges of the pastry cases with a little beaten egg, then pop into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, until that top edge of the pastry is golden and the filling is cooked through. Leave them to cool for 15 minutes, then carefully free them from the muffin tin (I found a butter knife really helpful) and place them on a cooling rack.
- While the pies are cooling down, put thevinegar and redcurrant jelly into a small saucepan. Stir on a medium heat for 2-3 minutes until the jelly has melted and then add the berries. Mix the cornflour and water to get a smooth paste and then stir into the berries and cook until the juices have thickened a little and the berries are starting to soften – don’t cook the berries for too long or they’ll pop. Leave to cool before spooning over the pies (if you’ve overdone the cornflour then spoon while its hot because once it cools it will be impossible to work with, again, as I found out the hard way!).
- The cornflour may take the sheen off the blueberry topping mix in which case brush a very VERY little bit of olive oil over the berries to give them a glaze. Scoff!
