Sausage and Egg

I had half a tube of sausage meat sitting in my fridge all week, after making the sausage rolls for Mothers' Day. Just the perfect amount to make a couple of Scotch eggs (p97). If you've never had a Scotch egg, it's a boiled egg with a casing of sausage meat.

I wanted my Scotch eggs for lunch on Sunday, and (unusually) was organised enough to boil the eggs the night before. One of the eggs cracked as I lowered it into the water, but it boiled ok without totally exploding. I dropped the other one on the floor as I was putting them into the fridge - luckily it was hard-boiled at the time and didn't make a mess.

On Sunday, I grabbed out the sausage meat, and went to mix it with onion and tomato sauce to make the casing for the eggs. There was one small hiccup in this plan, that being when I went to get an onion, I found I didn't have any. So the casing just ended up being sausage meat with a little tomato sauce.

I peeled the eggs, and surrounded each with a handful of the sausage mixture. Then I rolled them in breadcrumbs, and they were ready to cook. The recipe says to deep-fry them, but I really didn't want to faff about with hot oil, and in any case, sausage meat has enough fat in it without deep frying it as well.

So I drew on my extensive previous experience in making Scotch eggs, i.e. one cooking class in primary school, in which we definitely did not play around with boiling oil. We'd baked ours in the oven, and I decided to do the same with mine. Half an hour in the oven is not nearly as quick as a few minutes in hot oil, but it's healthier. It also gave me time to throw together a salad to go with it.

The Scotch egg was a perfect lunch for a dreary grey Sunday - warm and very filling. If I happen to have some extra sausage meat to use up sometime, I'll make these again. On the other hand, I don't think I'd bother buying sausage meat especially to make them. They're nice, but not so special I'd go out of my way to have them again.