Pastry Practice

I absolutely love this pastry dough recipe and have wanted to try using it for things other than the hand pies in the recipe.  It is such a lovely flaky mock puff pastry that is a cinch to make.  The dough is assembled and ready in under an hour versus real puff pastry dough that takes all day to make.  It has just the right buttery salty flavor that works well with both sweet and savory baked treats.

 Last week I had some leftover chicken meat after I processed a whole chicken.  I'd never cooked a chicken like that before and it was delicious and moist.  It was also the cleanest I'd ever gotten the carcass!  We had all kinds of chicken pieces to top salads and I used some along with the broth for a fabulous chicken noodle soup.  The last of the leftovers were made into chicken pot pies.  I made up my own gravy using onions, carrots and celery softened in butter with some salt and pepper.  I added some flour and chicken stock for the roux and finished it with some dried thyme, dried sage and some frozen peas.  I let it cool completely before spooning it into my wide ramekins.  I topped each with a round of this pastry and baked it.  These made for some elegant work lunches in the break room!

Today is a glorious sunny day with temperatures in the 60's!  It's a regular heat wave!  I have the deck door and the bedroom window open to air out the house.  Lopi is laying in the sun on the deck and I am baking.  I only used half the pastry dough I mixed up last week and had the bright idea to try my hand at some sausage rolls.  These are eaten everywhere in England.  They are a crumbled sausage wrapped in puff pastry.  I had half a tube of Jimmy Dean sausage in my freezer that I browned and cooled.  The sausage in the UK version is more of a nutmeg sausage but this worked just fine.  Next time I will try to make some from scratch with some ground pork.  I used an egg wash and these browned quite nicely.  Num num.  Dave will have a nice after school snack today.

I was able to make 6 sausage rolls with the amount of meat I had so I used the last scraps of dough to make 2 jam tarts using my strawberry freezer jam.  Delish.  I never thought to use jam for these and almost wish I didn't know they'd turn out so well because now this means I don't have to wait for summer raspberries.  I can literally make these at the drop of a hat.

And finally, here is a photo of Lopi's blue feet.  She got ahold of a ball point pen and chewed it to bits.  She couldn't deny it if she wanted because the evidence speaks for itself!