Giant Sausage Roll

Springtime is a great moment for entertaining: everyone is so happy about the return of sun, the smell of freshly mown grass and the daffodil heads bobbing in the park. When entertaining at home, we take most of our catering cues from childhood Easter parties, whatever time of the year it is: it's the perfect combination of great tasting, impressive looking but low effort party food. It's all about a feeling of 'plenty'.

This also chimes pretty well with the trend towards an informal, homespun style of service that we've been seeing lately in bars, restaurants and members clubs, with country style kitchen tables used for bartending and rustic snacks on sale. Our particular reference here is the top floor at the newly refurbished Electric in Portobello (see image of top floor, below), which has the aforementioned 'kitchen table bar' and also serves one of our favourite party foods: slices of giant sausage roll.

This is so easy to make you'll barely break a sweat....

Ingredients:

1 pack ready rolled puff pastry
1 pack cumberland sausages (buy good ones, please!)
1 pack 12 quail eggs, boiled and peeled
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 pears, peeled, cored and finely chopped
Handful curly parsley leaves, minced
Handful sage leaves, minced
4 slices of ham, roughly chopped
2 slices of wholemeal bread, broken into breadcrumbs
Tabasco
1 egg, beaten

STEP 1
Pre-heat your oven to 200C. Snip the ends of your sausages and squeeze the meat out of the casings and into a bowl. Add the onion, pears, parsley, sage, ham, breadcrumbs and a couple of dashes of Tabasco to the sausage meat and mix well with clean hands. Give your hands a wash afterwards too...

STEP 2
Unroll your pre-rolled puff pastry onto a baking sheet and baste with some of the beaten egg. Arrange the pastry so it's in 'portrait' (rather than 'landscape') as you look at it. Arrange approx 2/3 of the sausage mix up the length of the right hand side of the pastry rectangle, leaving about 1 inch border from the edges. Try to make it as evenly distributed as possible.

STEP 3
Make a small furrow up the middle of your sausage meat. Lay out the boiled, peeled quail eggs end to end in the furrow. Cover the eggs with the remaining 1/3/ sausage mix and form the finished 'giant sausage' into a nice, even, semi-circular shape with your hands.

STEP 4
Fold the left hand side of the pastry over the sausage mix on the right hand side and pinch the pastry case shut with a fork. Trim any spare pastry and baste well with the remaining beaten egg.

STEP 5
Transfer to the oven and bake for approx 40 mins, or until risen and golden. Once baked move onto a wire rack on a baking tray, as the sausage fat can sometimes make the base of the roll soggy, and it needs a chance to dry out.

STEP 6
Once cooled, serve in fat slices on a wooden board, accompanied by a couple of types of mustard. Await universal praise.