Northern Irish Pasties

Another peculiarly Northern Irish food is the Pastie.  For the rest of the British Isles, a pastie is some sort of pastry with a savoury filling, but for the Ulsterman, it's normally battered deliciousness, available at every chippy (mmm, pastie and chips 🤤).  Even better when put in a bread roll to make a Pastie Bap!

Ingredients

500g Northern Irish Vegetable Roll
1kg Potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks (I often use frozen mash instead as a time saver)
100g Butter
2x 130g Batter Mix (yes, another cheat - but it's only about 25p a pack and saves time!)
Salt
Oil for frying

Method

1. Cover the potatoes in lightly salted water and bring to the boil.  Boil for 15-20 minutes until soft.

2. Drain the potatoes and mash with the butter until smooth.  Try to use as little butter as possible, as you want your potatoes to be fairly dry.  I'm really bad at doing mash without lumps (I have no patience!), so I use a potato ricer to get it smooth.

3. Put the vegetable roll and mash into a bowl and knead together with your hands until the mixture is an even paste.

4. Shape the mixture into balls that fit in the palm of your hand and squash slightly to make patties.  You should get around 20 from this mixture.  Place these in the fridge to chill for around 30 minutes.

5. Heat your oil in a pan (I use a wok) - if you have a deep fryer use that.  Make sure the oil is hot.

6. It's not hot enough. Wait until it's hot!  In the meantime, make up the batter mix from the pack instructions, but use slightly less water than it says to get a thick batter.

7. Coat the patties in the batter (it's easiest if you keep one hand wet and one hand dry).  Now the tricky bit... Hold the battered patty half in, half out of the oil for a few seconds, before dropping in.  This gives the batter time to set slightly before you let go, which will help it not to stick to the bottom of the pan (or basket).

8. Fry in batches of around 4 patties at a time (to prevent the oil cooling down) for around 5-7 minutes until the batter is a golden and crispy.  Turn them over in the pan halfway through cooking, to get an even colour. (Don't turn them too much, as they have a tendency to fall to bits if you do.)  Let them cool a little before eating.

It's unlikely you will eat 20 pasties in one go!  You can keep them in the fridge for a few days, and reheat in the oven at 230℃ for around 10 minutes.  They can also be frozen - double the cooking time if oven baking straight from frozen.  Oven cooking is great, as it makes the batter go extra crispy!

Alternative options

If you're not keen on deep fat frying and batter and all the mess and potential burning that goes with that, skip steps 5-8.  You can just fry the patties as they are for a few minutes on each side, and they still taste great.  Or, coat the patties in plain flour, then beaten egg, then breadcrumbs, and bake in the oven at 230℃ for about 15-20 minutes until cooked through.

Sugar Free Lemon and Lime Loaf Cake

I hate baking.  There, I've said it!  Almost every time I bake, it just doesn't come out right.  I get collapsed cakes and stodgy muffins.  They normally taste OK, but they just aren't quite right, know what I mean?

But my husband LOVES cake.  Unfortunately, he is diabetic, and cakes need sugar to give it the texture.  But do they?  After looking at many recipes and tweaking them, I have finally found a cake with no sugar, that even I can bake and comes out right every time.  And as a bonus, it's not bad on the old carbs either.

Also, I have finally discovered the two keys to baking - ALWAYS measure everything very carefully, and ALWAYS pre-heat the oven!

Ingredients

175g Low Fat Spread (or butter, if you can afford the calories!)
30g Granulated Sweetener (I prefer the taste of sucralose sweeteners - usually in yellow packaging)
225g Self Raising Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
3 large or 4 small Eggs (beaten)
3 tbsp Lemon Juice
1 tbsp Lime Cordial

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180℃.  Place the low fat spread and sweetener in a bowl.

2. Stir until they just come together and you can't see any granules left.  With an electric mixer, this only takes a few seconds.

3.  Mix the flour and baking powder together.  Add 2 tablespoons of the flour mixture and one tablespoon of beaten egg and whisk until combined.  Repeat this until all the flour mixture and egg have been combined in the mix.

4.  Add the lemon juice and lime cordial and whisk until combined.

5. Pour the mixture into a lined loaf tin.  I am lazy, and buy pre-made tin liners, but baking paper works just as well, or you can grease the tin with butter.

6.  Bake in the oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour.  It's done if you can stick a skewer in the middle and it comes out clean.  Serve in slices.

Northern Irish Vegetable Roll

Vegetable Roll is confusing to folk from outside Northern Ireland.  Why?  Because it's mostly meat!  More correctly, it's sausage meat and vegetables, normally served fried or grilled in rounds as part of an Ulster Fry, Northern Ireland's favourite cooked breakfast.  Imagine slices of black pudding, but made from sausage meat instead of blood.

Since moving to Manchester, I've craved vegetable roll a lot, but never been able to find it.  One of the Asda stores nearby did have an experiment where they replaced the butchery counter with a franchise from a Northern Irish butcher and for one glorious year, vegetable roll was available whenever I wanted it... but sadly it didn't last.  I've been trying to make my own for a while, but the one recipe I found for it online tasted wrong and included odd ingredients I wouldn't normally have (what on earth is mace??!!).  Eventually I started experimenting and this is the version I've liked the most.

Ingredients

900g Sausages
(2 packs - these should traditionally be beef, but I like Asda Butcher's Selection Pork & Tomato)
2 Spring Onions
2 Baby Leeks (they had none today, so I used about half a normal leek)
120g Fine Breadcrumbs (yes, I cheat on this and use packet breadcrumbs, but I'm lazy!)
Pinch of salt and black pepper

Method

1. Take the skins off the sausages and put the sausage meat in a bowl.

2. Finely chop the spring onions and leeks.  I use an electric chopper (a bit like a tiny food processor) that I picked up for about a tenner.  It makes life easier and gives you nice tiny pieces.

3. Add the chopped leeks and spring onions, along with the breadcrumbs to the bowl with the sausage meat, and add a little salt and pepper.

4. Time to get your hands dirty!  Knead the whole mixture with your hands until it all comes together.  It's done when the vegetables are fairly evenly spread and you can no longer feel the grittiness of the breadcrumbs.

5. Turn out the mixture on to a board and form into a thick sausage shape, about 6-8 cm thick.

6. Wrap the mixture tightly in cling film.  If you need to, roll it while in the cling film to get a nice round shape.  Then chill the sausage in the fridge for a few hours.

7.  Once chilled, cut the sausage into rounds around 1-2 cm thick.  If you're not using it all at once, it will freeze really well.  To cook, fry or grill the rounds for around 5 minutes on each side until cooked through.  Or do what I do, oven bake it at 180℃ for about 15-20 minutes - this results in a bit of a drier meat, but I love the crunchy crust this gives the outside.

Welcome to Grubbed Up!

Here we go - I'm starting a new blog - this one to focus on food and recipes!  I don't know if I'll update every week or only post once a year - and actually, it doesn't matter - this is mainly just a way for me to be creative when the mood takes me.

The original thought behind this blog came from looking for a specific recipe online (for Northern Irish Vegetable Roll if you're wondering), and not being able to find it.  (Well, I found one but it had weird ingredients in it (what the heck is mace????) - and didn't really taste like what I remember.) . So I experimented until I got something that I enjoyed - why not share this with the world?

A lot of food blogs focus very much on cordon bleu, pseudo-chef style fine dining.  That's not what I'm aiming for here!  I'm just going to be sharing things I personally like to eat.  You see, I DON'T cook everything from scratch (gasp!).  I take shortcuts.  I use ready-made pastry and frozen mash.  And I don't care!  Don't expect pretty, instagram-ready meals from me, just tasty grub.  Nothing here will be going on Rate-My-Plate 😂.  If you like it, great - if not, no problem, it's down to your own taste.

The main thing here is I like trying things out and adapting them to make myself happy - isn't that what food is all about?