Hope all is well in your ‘bubble’ and that you’re not tearing your hair out looking for things to do for yourself and/or any littlelies in your care, during these trying times!!

We have much to be thankful for in our house – or so I remind myself when I psych myself up for cooking dinner each night… It’s certainly been a challenge to come up with different meal ideas when you don’t have takeaways to punctuate all those cooking nights! And we sorely miss our local café, with its tasty pies and pastries and coffee. So this post is another café favourite that I am pretty confident will be a satisfactory stand-in until you can get your post-lockdown savoury fix!

The recipe is really versatile – you can use any other meat for the mince (lamb is delicious, especially if you swap the sage for rosemary) just as long as you keep the sausage meat in the recipe otherwise it will go too dry while cooking. Use other dried herbs if you don’t like fennel, and if you don’t have sage in your garden almost anything else would do (mint, parsley, rosemary as above).

Pork, Fennel and Sage Sausage Rolls

Enough for four hungry adults for one meal, or two dinner servings plus four snack servings for later!

• 500g pork mince
• 450g (or thereabouts) sausage meat
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs (from crusts or sourdough are best)
• 1 egg, lightly whisked – half for mixture and half for glazing
• 2 Tbsp chopped fresh sage (plus extra leaves if you want to decorate your rolls)
• 2 tsp fennel seeds
• 400g block of flaky puff pastry OR two sheets of pre-rolled flaky puff
• Approx. 1/4 cup flour, for dusting
• freshly cracked black pepper and sea salt to season

1. Defrost puff pastry at room temperature – this might take a couple of hours if using block of pastry. Heat your oven to 200°C, conventional bake.
2. Make sausage mixture: In a large bowl, mix together mince, sausage meat, breadcrumbs, half of egg, sage, fennel seeds, and salt and pepper with a large metal spoon. This takes a bit of elbow grease, and after mixing for about a minute add some more salt and pepper to ensure the mixture is well seasoned.
3. Prepare the pastry if using a block of pastry: Cut block in half and work with one half at a time. Dust benchtop with flour and roll out first piece of pastry into a rectangle approx. 3mm thick. Cut this rectangle in half along the longest side. Repeat with other half of pastry. If using pre-rolled pastry: Cut pastry sheets in half along the longest side.
4. Get ready to roll: Divide the sausage mixture into four portions. Line each portion up along the longest edge of each piece of pastry. Use a pastry brush to dampen the opposite edge. Roll the pastry from the meat edge to the damp edge, keeping the pastry wrapped as tightly as you can around the sausage meat. Rest the rolled pastry so the dampened edge sits under the centre of the roll, to keep it closed. Cut 4-5 slits in the top of each roll at equal spacings and brush the entire roll with the egg – if you have extra herb leaves you can place one leaf/sprig in each slit after applying the egg wash.
5. Place the rolls on a lined baking tray and bake  for 40 minutes or until the pastry is golden and the sausage rolls are cooked all the way through – I generally have to sacrifice one by cutting it in half to check doneness!

I’d love to hear what you’ve been making to keep dinnertimes interesting!

Kia kaha!!