My Dad's Sausage Meat Plait

I have a bit of free time on my hands at the moment and decided to do a bit of cooking for the family...you know...proper mid-week supper type stuff. This got me thinking that it might be interesting to do a mini series of dishes that fit the mantra "tasty, cheap and quick". So here we go…

My Dad used to make this for us all the time when I was a kid. In fact the only other dish he cooked was a weird rice salad of green peppers, onions and frankfurter sausages. This sausage plait is great, basically just a giant sausage roll and none the worse for it. The rice salad, not so great. Sorry Dad!

Ingredients:

Ready rolled puff pastry from the supermarket

1 pack of really good quality sausages

1 bunch of flat leaf parsley

1 medium red onion, peeled and very finely chopped

2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce

1 egg, beaten

Method:

Set the oven to 190c. Take the skins off the sausages and mix the meat with the onion, parsley and chilli sauce. Season the mix with lots of black pepper and a reasonable amount of salt. Unroll the pastry and shape the meat in the middle - you want a long sausage of even thickness running end to end along the centre of the pastry as if you were making a sausage roll. Using a sharp knife, make cuts along both free edges of the pastry, 2cm apart from the meat to the edge of the pastry. 

Egg wash and start to plait from one end, folding one pastry strip at a time over the meat at 45 degrees. Follow this with one strip from the other side and……urggh. This is really difficult to verbalise. If you struggle (and you really shouldn't as it is so easy) go and ask a six year old girl with long hair to show you how to plait hair. Hmmm….if you are a middle aged man perhaps don't ask a random six year old girl…..maybe look up 'how to plait' on Google. Moving on.

Egg wash the whole thing and place on baking parchment and then on a sturdy baking sheet. Bake for 35 to 45 mins until golden and piping hot in the middle. I served mine with mash and purple sprouting. Ketchup is the sauce of choice.