Dish 10: Pork & Fennel Sausage Rolls

The dish

You may know by now that I'm not a huge pork fan. Still, not only have I sworn to myself to prepare every dish in this cookbook, I will always give stuff a second, third, or fourth chance. 

And so I chose to make Pork & Fennel Sausage Rolls (p. 120).

The preparation

To be honest, the prospect of having to make my own sausage rolls was kind of daunting. I had no idea if it was going to be hard or if I had to be very careful with amounts. 

In terms of preparation, this is becoming kind of a regular thing: you start by chopping things up, such as shallots!

And then you chop up some more things, including the fennel! For the record and in case you have never cooked with fennel before (comme moi), remove the heart of the fennel, like you would with witlof (chicory/endive).

Next step: mashing everything together with your pork mince. It seemed all fine and dandy up until this point. 

And then came the part that worried me: getting out your puff pastry and actually forming the sausage rolls.

Unlike the recipe in the book, the puff pastry I had were not slabs of 15 x 30cm. Instead I had to work with squares of 10 x 10cm.

I had calculated that I didn't need that many, but ended up adding more as the portions of the minced meat concoction were so plentiful that the 6 or 7 sheets I had laid out were hardly sufficient.

Still, I tried to stuff as much meat into the puff pastry as possible.

As you can see, the meat mix took up about one third of the puff pastry, so folding these little rascals and keeping them shut was quite an experience. Luckily my egg wash helped a lot, and I think the experience I have with using this kind puff pastry when making apple turnovers also gave me a boost of confidence.

Let me tell you: I won. And all these little pigs in blankets went straight into the oven with their fennel comrades.

 

The result

They turned out quite alright, although, perfectionist as I am, I'm not entirely pleased with the way they look, simply because they don't look the way they do in the book. But then, this is the first time ever I made them, and they are incredibly good-looking, aren't they?

As for taste... Well, let's just say they tasted of pork. But the addition of fennel was really great! I think I did make a mistake regarding seasoning, though, because I found that I really needed to sprinkle extra salt over it to give it some flavour. The moment I had figured that out, it was all good.

Mine were also twice as big as they are supposed to be if you follow the recipe precisely, but since I prepared them for dinner, I figured a slightly bigger version of the same thing couldn't do any harm. And it didn't, but they are quite heavy on the stomach. I would definitely suggest them as a party snack, though!

Next time

Next time I'm not going to prepare a full dish. Instead, I will focus on one of the extras in The Next Element, and that is a sauce! I know, it's absolutely thrilling. But just you wait, Henry Higgins!

See you at our next elemental meal!

Dish 6: Simple Chicken Satay

The dish

I love satay. I also love that by writing satay the way you do you also pronounce it the way I was always taught by my Dutch-Indo grandmother. In Dutch the word is pronounced with the accent on the "tay" part of it, which has never ceased bothering me. Yeah, I know, right? 

But anyway, back to the recipe. I love chicken, I love spice, I love rice and I definitely love peanuts, so this dish really couldn't go wrong.

The preparation

The trickiest part about preparing this is getting rid of the bones in the chicken thighs. I have to admit, the first thigh I butchered, I seriously butchered. But by thigh four, the bone started to come away more or less clean. A moral victory, although I did curse a bit at our cookbook author for the duration of thighs one and two ("Why couldn't we just have used chicken breast fillets?"). But I suppose that this entire journey is also one that should teach me a thing or two about cooking, and I have learned now that after getting really angry, I don't care much about cutting through bone/joints, ripping off skin and generally getting my hands dirty. Will that also do the trick when I have to handle the too-many-legged dishes? I'm not so sure.

Once you've chopped up all the chicken, it's a matter of preparing the marinade and covering the chicken with it. Then you proceed to leave it standing for quite some time.

What I found very important to keep in mind is that reducing any kind of sauce simply takes a lot of time. If you follow this recipe step by step, you might start on this part a little late. However, since I've learned from my past mistakes, I got my peanut butter and stock bubbling away quite pleasantly while my chicken was still marinating.

You may worry that this dish doesn't have a lot of vegetables in it, but that's actually quite alright. It contains a lot of onion and also quite a fair bit of tomatoes.

The result

What can I say? This dish's title lives up to his name (which is awesome!). It is simple, it has chicken and it has satay. 

Oh, and if you are a fan of spicy, you will love it all the more. Eating this left a tingle on my lips. Next time I might even add another red chilli. Delish.

Unfortunately, due to the heavy load of onion, my onion-loathing best friend was not as impressed with this plate of food as she was with the Mid-Weekend Beef Curry, but she still finished her plate and didn't hurl. That's quite a victory, I should say!

Next time

As promised and already announced, next time (which will be Saturday) I will prepare the Roast Beef with Winter Vegetables (p. 52) for my friends, and if it is hard and if after that my friends say it's disgusting, I will whack them with the roasting tin I made it in. Even if it turns out that it is disgusting. Not that I expect it to be, mind. :)

See you at our next elemental meal!

Oh, but before I end this, let me just leave you with this:

That's right. We're ruling this joint! (For now.)