My good friend, Peter, the boss of Payung, mentioned to me before that he loved sardine rolls but they were not available anywhere in town so that day, I decided to make some to give to him.
I remember way back in the good ol’ days, the girl students were taught to make these in their Home or Domestic Science lessons, among a whole lot of other useful things but of course, they do not have that subject in school anymore and if I am not wrong, they would use shortcrust pastry to make the rolls.
I do not have a problem at all making shortcrust pastry but I do not want to buy a box or a bag of wheat flour and use about half and end up stuck with the rest – we would not be using that for anything these days as my girl is gluten intolerant. That was why I went to the supermarket and bought this frozen puff pastry…
My girl bought and used it before and we all agreed that it was very good but of course, we cannot buy that and use anymore these days.
It is so very easy to use – you just take it out of the freeze and let it thaw…
…and that does not take very long. In the meantime, you can work on the filling and that was exactly what I did.
I had these two small cans of mackerel…
…in the pantry so I decided to use those. I mashed the fish…
…keeping just a bit of the sauce in case if it was too wet, it might flow out of the rolls during the process of baking and make quite a mess.
These were the ingredients I prepared…
– one Bombay onion, chopped, sliced chilies and Thai Basil leaves and some spring onions (I just added these simply because I had a lot growing in my garden)…and after frying the onion in a bit of oil till softened and cooked, I added all the rest before adding the mackerel. Easy-peasy, done in no time at all…
Next came the process of wrapping the rolls. I egg-washed the sides and placed the filling in the middle of the pastry…
…and then I folded in one end like this…
…and rolled it over the other end. After that, I sealed the ends and pressed them down well using a fork and I cut slits on top…
…using a knife to let the air escape whilst baking.
Of course, I had to egg-wash all the rolls on top as well…
…so that once they were done, they would have the nice golden coating like this…
As soon as they were done…
…I quickly sent them over to the café for Peter and all the nice people there to enjoy. Of course I was delighted when everyone starting praising the rolls to the skies – they all loved them, it seemed.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 