Britain 2024

Home at last. A treat that Heidi has long anticipated making. 

In our household, the shop-bought pre-packed meager attempt at making these are considered a must-have for any weekend picnic, mid-week lunch occasion, or other excuse to accompany a packet of crisps.

Scotch eggs - and this week I was allowed to help.

A wholesome fresh chicken egg is soft-boiled, blanketed in hearty sausage meat, sweetened with caramelised onions, seasoned to perfection, glistened with a crispy breadcrumb shell and deep-fried. Your arteries might not thank you, but your taste buds will.

As we welcome in a new government, we can do away with Michael Gove's opinion that this does not count as a substantial meal. I'd challenge anyone to eat a couple of Heidi's boulder-sized scotch eggs as a starter! That definitely deserves a pint to wash it down. (Catch up on the news blunder here.)

Serve with the posh tomato ketchup. Satisfying.
(Except Tally didn't like the scotch, instead eating the egg from the inside alone.)

Onions

Cooked and cooled eggs

Naked eggs

Squishy

The production line

Dunking

Where did it go?

And serve with the posh ketchup

Recipe because you all need to make more of these and share them round

Ingredients
6 of the largest eggs you can find
8 good pork sausages
2 large red onions, fined diced
sage, thyme, oregano and half a grated nutmeg
salt and black pepper

To coat
plain flour
3 more eggs beaten
100g panko breadcrumbs

Method

1. Fry the onions gently to caramelise, stirring as little as you can. Add the herbs, salt and pepper. Add a heaped dessert spoon of soft brown sugar, but don't tell Siân.
2. Soft boil the eggs, don't ask me anything about how long this should take, Heidi forgot to set the timer when they came to the boil, so we kinda guessed and got it almost perfect.
3. Immediately give the eggs an ice bath for 10 minutes - this prevents the grey decolouring on the yolk.
4. Painstakingly remove the shells and inner membrane.
5. Remove the sausages from their skins and mix in the onion concoction. Hands in messyness. (In my grandparents' bakery, they chose to use the meat from de-skinned sausages for sausage rolls rather than buying unwrapped sausagemeat, because the quality was better.)
6. Divide the sausage mess into 4 (yes, four) equal measures placing each between two sheets of clingfilm. Squish the mess to replicate a pancake, just large enough to wrap an egg.
7. And now for the fun part. Encase the first four eggs one at a time with this sequence:
   - flour
   - sausage blanket, removing and keeping the excess 
   - flour
   - beaten egg
   - breadcrumbs
   - beaten egg
   - hokey cokey
   - breadcrumbs
8. Use the collected excess meat to make one more super-sized blanket and repeat the wrapping for egg number five, which becomes 'the boulder' (see below).
9. Heidi eats egg number six.
10. Deep fry. Determining when the sausage is cooked is precarious, but no one has yet informed me that they've died from my cooking.
11. Leave a little while to cool before eating, and then taken a good hour to recover.

The boulder might become something of a tourist attraction