Sally's Notebook
Recipes
- Apple and Goats Cheese Filo Parcels
- Homemade burgers
- Best Brownies (Allrecipes.com)
- Caramel Shortbread squares (Allrecipes.com)
Apple and Goats Cheese Filo Parcels
- Filo pastry
- Bramley apples
- Goats Cheese
- Pinenuts
- Cinnamon
- Melted butter
Cut the apple in to slices, avoiding cutting through the apple core. Using a round pastry cutter, cut out lots of round apple pieces (ending up with a pile of over-sized apple pound coins). If possible, cut the goats cheese in to similar slices, but if the goats cheese is too gooey, then just cut the goats cheese up in to equal-sized portions and use your fingers to shape in to circles.
Lay a layer of filo pastry on a flat surface. Using a pastry brush carefully cover the filo in melted butter. Put another layer of filo pastry on top of the buttered layer, but at 90 degrees rotated, so it looks like a cross. Carefully brush butter over the second slice.
In the middle of the pastry cross, put a slice of apple, then dust lightly with cinnamon, then put a circle of goats cheese on top, and push a few pinenuts in to the goats cheese. Keep layering up, topping off with an apple slice dusted with cinnamon. Wrap up the parcel just like a paper parcel (lift a side from the second filo layer over the top of the pile, then life the opposite side and put over the top, then one side of the bottom layer, followed by the other side). Coat the outside of the parcel lightly with butter and neaten up any loose edges.
Put in the oven at around 150 degrees-ish for about 10-15 minutes until it looks nice and crispy brown on the outside.
Homemade burgers (makes about 14)
- About 800g to 1kg of mince from local butcher
- 1 egg
- 2 slices of bread, slightly toasted then shredded in to breadcrumbs using mixer
- Dice up a few handfuls of chestnut mushrooms
- Few drops of tabasco sauce
- Bit of salt and pepper
- Few drops of soy sauce
- Cheddar, cut up in to 1cm x 2cm squares
Put everything except the cheese into a large bowl and squidge together lots with your fingers. Really need to squidge lots to mush everything together properly. Alternatively, use a mixer if you have one, but use plastic or beater not metal blades. Need to mush everything, not cut up.
Get a round pastry cutter. Turn it so the sharp edge is pointing up, and the rounded edge is on the worktop. Get a couple of teaspoonsful of the mixture and squidge inside the cutter. Place a piece of cheese in the middle. Cover up with another few teaspoonfuls of mixture. Using the back of the spoon, compress the mixture down well.
I use squares of silicon paper to sit between the burgers to stop them sticking.