Toad in the hole from scratch

I followed BBC Good housekeeping magazines recipe for this. Vegetarians and vegans forgive me, you could use vegetarian sausages, but the batter needed eggs….

I used seven frozen sausages

2 eggs

1 small onion, sliced

Accompanying vegetables, potato, carrot and broccoli.

140 grams of self raising flour (I didn’t check which sort I needed)

Milk to add to the batter mix.

I oiled a dish and baked the sausages with some sliced onion for twenty minutes. In the meantime I put the flour in a bowl, made a dent in it and added the eggs stirring with a fork till it was all mixed together. Then I slowly poured in and mixed milk into the batter so it was like thick double cream.

I poured the batter over the part cooked sausages, and returned them to the oven on gas mark 8 because my cooker does not get very hot. I checked them over the next twenty minutes but I still managed to burn the batter a bit. I also think I should have added more milk so that it would have been moister. I chopped the vegetables up small so I boiled them on the hob for twenty minutes. Finally I added gravy granules to some of the vegetable water to pour over the meal.

I’ve never made this before, but it was something my mother made for our evening meals. I’m glad I tried. I will try and remember to make this again.

Winter stew

I just made a vegetarian stew for dinner. I could have made Staffordshire Lobby which is a beef based stew, lobbing all sorts of things into the pot. But I used a meat substitute, Quorn pieces.

Basically I put two small chopped potatoes, two small sliced carrots and half a sweet potato, peeled and sliced, into a pan and covered them in boiling water. I let them simmer for a few minutes, then chopped up a small red onion, chopped some slices off a cabbage (about a sixth of it) and two sticks of celery sliced up. Then I added half a pack of Quorn and a couple of teaspoons of Lazy Garlic. I let everything simmer for about twenty minutes. Then I added a couple of vegetable stock cubes. Let it cook for a few more minutes before serving with a hunk of brown bread and vegetable spread. I didn’t add salt, but if you do add it on top of the stew when you serve, that way it sits on the food and doesn’t get absorbed into it. That means you don’t eat too much salt. You can also add pepper at the end.