The Somerset Tiddy Oggy - A venture into British cooking!

Dear readers,

I believe that it is high time for a new recipe post, wouldn’t you agree?  Now on Sunday I arrived back at school – 20 degree weather and all (ugh!) – and am half way through the first week of my final semester.  Which is strange, but not worth dwelling on at the moment…there’s food to be sharing!

So the last day I was at home, my mom and I thought it would be fun to try some new recipes we had picked out the day before.  I had brought a cook book from England back home for her, so this is where we chose our menu from; “Britain’s Best Dish”.

What I’ll share with you today is the appetizer we made.  A play on the British, or Cornwall, pasty, they went over well with the family and are something I will definitely be making again.  With that, let’s get started on this Somerset Tiddy Oggy.

The final product? A fine plate of Somerset Tiddy Oggy

For this recipe, we make a few changes but mostly stuck to the recipe.  Of course, you can do it differently with the pastry dough and make different sizes, but we ended up making 16 individual Tiddy Oggies to put out following the recipe amounts.

Ingredients:

1 package frozen pastry dough, thawed (Here is where we cheated.  The book gives the recipe for making the dough as well, but with limited time we decided to just buy frozen dough)

Flour, enough to roll the pastry dough out

1 medium-large cooking apple (MacIntosh, Bramley)

1 tablespoon butter

1/4 cup finely chopped onion

2 small ribs celery, finely chopped

8 ounces ham, cooked, diced finely, about 1 cup

2 tablespoon chopped parsley

1 cup shredded aged Cheddar cheese

1 egg

salt and pepper

Melt the butter and cook the onion, celery, and apple

Alright then.  The first item to start on is the filling.  You’ll want to dice up the ham (we had some left over ham from Christmas so it was already cooked – a package of speck would work just as well as it is basically the same thing), peel, core, and chop the apple.  We cut them into small squares.  Chop up the onion and celery while you’re at it as well.

Melt the tablespoon of butter in your sauce pan over medium heat, and add the onion, celery and apple.  Once the onion becomes soft and translucent, throw the ham, parsley (calls for fresh, but using dried is completely fine), and a dash of salt and pepper.

The filling is ready

Mix together and remove from heat.  You can prepare this part ahead of time and just refrigerate the filling at this point.

Cheating on the dough…but we can’t always do it all, right?

Once you’re ready to really put these together, go ahead and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  It will take 25-30 minutes to bake, so plan accordingly.  Open the pastry dough and roll it out over a floured surface one sheet at a time.  Divide the sheet into 8 equal pieces (here we found that triangles worked well though “Britain’s Best Dish” featured circles).

Divide the filling in two halves and place about a tablespoon of filling into each of the 8 pieces of pastry dough.  Before wrapping the dough, lightly water the edges of the dough.  Go ahead and pinch the sides of the dough closed together, leaving an opening at the top and each corner wrapping over.  Add about a tablespoon of cheddar cheese right on top of the opening and set on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Fold them into a pouch/purse shape

Repeat with the other pastry dough sheet and the remainder of the filling.  Now here I have to stop and say that the recipe called to put breadcrumbs on each pastry with the cheddar cheese, however we decided we would be ok without it.  Once you have each Tiddy Oggy on the baking sheet, beat the egg and brush over the tops of each to glaze.  Place the sheet in the oven for about 30 minutes until the pastry is cooked and golden.

Add the cheese

The Tiddy Oggies can be served warm or cold and call to be served with a crab apple jelly or apple chutney.  We let them cool a bit after they came out of the oven, and then dug in.  We didn’t have the jelly or chutney, but found they were fantastic without.  So there we sat, enjoying our (slightly modified) Somerset Tiddy Oggy appetizer and getting sucked into the next segment of Downton Abbey as we waited for the right moment to start on the next part of the meal.

Brush with the beaten egg

In conclusion, these are a great appetizer and would be perfect to serve for company or just as we had it – simply before dinner!  You could even adjust them to make these into a proper pasty and have for dinner or lunch.  We all enjoyed them, and it was easy and fun to make.  I hope you’ll decide to give them a try as well.

The final product? A fine plate of Somerset Tiddy Oggy

And now it’s off to make dinner (another new recipe I’ll be trying tonight!) and get organized for my classes tomorrow.  Enjoy the rest of your week, readers, I do hope the year is starting off well for each of you.  Any fellow students out there, best of luck on your first weeks as well.  As always, thanks for reading, cheers!  Until then…

Mischief managed

(Not enough lolcatz lately…)

Oh? U iz making appetizerz now?

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