Disclaimer: I haven't been paid to promote any products or shops/stores. Just sharing our adventure in meal prepping.🤗
Hi Honeys,
How are you today? All well I hope and having a fabulous week🤗 The temperatures are starting to rise a little, it's supposed to reach the dizzying heights of 15C today with no rain forecast at all!🎉 I know, it's a silly thing to get excited about but here I am, happier than anyone has a right to be.🥰
We're still finding things we can meal prep, batch cook and freeze ahead of time for dinners later in the month. This is month three now of meal planning for the whole month and it's not just getting easier, it's saving us money on our food budget too.
Today I thought I'd share one of our latest little experiments in meal prepping for our freezer😊 Today's is one of my favourites, although we've also been prepping Hubby's favourites, such as sausage rolls and the most awesome (Hubby says so😊) homemade beef & onion burgers.
Back to todays little savory treat then honeys.😊 I've never been a huge fan of meat based savories preferring cheese & onion pasties instead. I think every Scot has a favourite from the menu at Greggs, the now famous bakery/take-away chain and their cheese & onion pasty has always been mine. I once waved at Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother while clutching a little paper bag containing my Greggs cheese & onion pasty, I would have shared it with her too if she hadn't been in her car... oh well.😊
This post has quite a few images, as usual, so it might be worth fetching a cuppa (and maybe a cookie or two😊) and making yourself comfortable, dear ones. I'll meet you back here in a few minutes with our cuppas, see you after the page break...
Welcome back honeys, do you have your cuppa? Me too☕🍪 Let's have a look at these so-easy-they-nearly-make-themselves cheese & onion pasties shall we?
Easiest Ever Cheese & Onion Pasties...
Ingredients:
1 sheet of ready rolled puff pastry
2-3 medium potatoes - mashed
½ onion - diced
80g cream cheese (approx)
optional - grated cheese to add
Directions:
1. Peel and quarter the potatoes. Boil the potatoes in a pot of water with a tiny pinch of salt (or skip the salt if you'd rather) for approximately 15-20 minutes - until you can pierce a potato easily with a knife or skewer. When cooked, very carefully drain the potatoes and add to a bowl. Mash them with a little butter/margarine/spread.
2. Roughly chop/dice ½ onion into small-ish pieces and add to the bowl containing the mashed potato. There's no need to mix through, we'll get there in a minute.😊
3. Next, add the cream cheese to the bowl, then mix with the mashed potato and diced onion until all combined. I've suggested 80g of cream cheese but you might use less (or a little more.) Use enough to make your cream cheese, mash & onion filling lovely and creamy.😋
4. Sit your bowl to one side for now honeys and we'll cut out the pasty shapes from our roll of pastry. As you can see, I managed to make 6 pasties with my sheet of pastry...
If I'd rolled out the remaining pastry I might have been able to make one or two more but I just folded it up and put it to one side for later as a treat for Hubby. He adores puff pastry and I thought I'd pop it into the oven later that evening and he could have it with dinner (sausages in onion gravy with fluffy mashed potatoes.😋)
5. Before we get to the fun part of assembling our pasties, let's take a minute to pre-heat the oven to 180C or 350F or gas mark 4.
6. Back to our pastry then honeys. To make the circles, I used the cutter supplied with our little electric pie maker, but you could just as easily use anything from a mug to a small cereal bowl. It's entirely up to you to decide what size your pasties will be. Maybe smaller pasties for tiny humans (this would be such a fun project for them to help make too😊) or huge man-sized pasties as a treat for adults deserving or a yummy treat. The pasties will be half the size of the circles, since we'll be filling them and folding them in half...
7. As you can see, the cream cheese, mash & onion mixture is placed on one side of the circle, making sure there isn't too much filling or it will be difficult to close and seal them. Next I added a little grated cheddar cheese on top, it's not essential, I just had a little in the fridge and it seemed like a good idea😊
8. Next, we fold each circle of pastry over and seal it closed. I used a fork to press the edges together...
9. (Nearly) the last thing to do before baking (or freezing for later) is to make a little cut across the top. Not enough to allow the filling to escape, of course. It's more decorative than anything really but it does allow the puff pastry to puff up even more.
10. Using a pastry brush or just a finger, gently coat the tops with a little milk or beaten egg then
very carefully place your pasties into the middle of the pre-heated oven for 14-18 minutes, until golden brown...
11. Serve to loved ones as a treat and await hugs and compliments.🤗🥰
Freezing for later?
If meal prepping a batch for later, either freeze on a baking tray/cookie sheet until frozen before carefully packing into a freezer container or pack them straight into the container, placing a piece of greaseproof paper/baking parchment between each pasty before freezing.
A Little More Fun...
If you had fun making these pasties with a sheet/roll of ready roll puff pastry, why not try using another sheet/roll to make some Cinnamon Rolls? It's so, so easy to do, takes minutes and is another great project that tiny humans will love to help with.
You can see how here honeys, and as part of that same post I also included the easiest method to make home made puff pastry too. Why not made a few batches of puff pastry and freeze it yourself for later?
A last word...
Having spent over two months now meal prepping, filling the freezer up with "future meals" for during the month ahead, I can honestly say I'm loving the change honeys. I love that I know what we're having for dinner each night, I know what I need to take out of the freezer, if anything, and I love how it's cut the amount of processed or packaged foods we're eating.
I'm loving that we can still include some of Hubby's favourites, such as sausage rolls and burgers, and that by making them at home we can also experiment with ingredients, control what goes into making them and can even make them healthier. When making our sausage rolls, for example, we use sausages that are very low fat to prevent "greasy" pastry when they cook.
When meal prepping Hubby's burgers, we use good quality mince, really low in fat content, an egg and breadcrumbs and freshly diced onion, all thoroughly mixed together and then formed into patties. Each burger is then placed into a freezer container, with wax paper between each layer to prevent them freezing together, just as we do with the pasties and sausage rolls.
So, there we have it. Do you meal prep honeys? Are you a fan of pasties too? Thank you for keeping me company today, it means more than I can say.🤗 Till next time dear ones, hugs always x
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