Recipes

Cranberry and Orange Sausage Rolls

December's ingredient of the month:
Oranges & Cranberries

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.
Place a large saucepan over a medium heat and add a little cooking oil. Add the shallots, garlic, cranberries, stir then cover with a lid and allow to soften gently for around 5 minutes. When ready, take off the heat and leave to cool.
Place the sausagemeat and chopped parsley into a bowl and add the cooled shallot and cranberry mixture. Add the orange zest, season with salt and pepper and mix together thoroughly – by hand is best!
Roll out the puff pastry to form a long oblong about 15cm wide and 30cm long. Place the sausagemeat mix onto the long front edge of the pastry, forming it into a long sausage shape.
Beat your egg and add the splash of milk to make an egg wash. Brush this over the remaining exposed pastry, keeping at least half back for the next stage.
Gently lift the front edge of the pastry and roll it away from you, wrapping the sausage meat in the pastry and forming a long roll. Brush the roll with the remaining egg wash.
With a sharp knife, cut the roll into individual pieces the size that you require, place on a baking tray and place in the oven. Leave until the pastry is golden brown, then remove and place on a wire rack to cool.

A festive twist on a favourite party treat!

Mark Stower
Company Executive Chef

No Christmas feast is complete without sausage rolls, especially if they are home-made. Mark’s December recipe with added cranberries, shallots and orange zest is a delicious twist on the traditional sausage roll.
Oranges have long played a role at Christmas – probably because they were one of the few fruits available in the winter in Northern Europe. In days gone by, when fruit was a luxury, an orange in the stocking on Christmas morning would have been greeted with as much joy by a child as a new toy – very hard to believe today!
The cranberry is a native North American plant. Cranberries are traditionally served with the Thanksgiving Day turkey in the USA, apparently introduced on the first Thanksgiving celebration because of their important health giving properties - among other things they are a good source of vitamin C.
Cranberry sauce may not have featured in Victorian Christmas feasts but is now usually served with our Christmas turkey. A small type of cranberry grows in Northern Europe and was used in Scandinavian liquors and cranberries do get a mention from Mrs Beeton as a pudding ingredient.

Dr Juliet Gray, Company Nutritionist