Sausage Rolls and Plum jam!

Its been quite a week. The 2nd schedule of the film finished yesterday, and though i was cooking i hadnt had the time to blog about it. We had a mild disaster for dinner the other day i cooked -- the food came out fine, the photographs--are few!
Over the last few weeks ( ever since ive started blogging) ive realised that i like cooking stuff that i usually have fond memories of. Its usually connected to people that i love and the good times that ive shared with them. More than the taste of the food itself, i think it represents a time that i have shared with them.
The other day i remembered that sometimes amma used to take me to "hot breads" a bakery in chennai on my way back from school. It was in one of Madras' oldest malls ( then it was completely new and shiny) and it was the hippest bakery of its time. It was a place that totally fascinated me. It had a glass partition where you could see the bakers inside punching the dough and where you took a tray and could choose from an array of breads. The sausage rolls were my favorite and i would be quite disappointed if they didnt have it that day.
It was my day off from shoot, just before a really hectic couple of days. I figured that if i had made bread once, i could make the rolls. How difficult could it actually be? It wasnt.

So i made the dough ( halved it from the bread i had made earlier- with all the same steps) added some cheddar cheese and wholegrain mustard and then split it up according to the number of the sausages. Then i rolled each ball out into a snake, except it kept shrinking back to the original size. I had to roll it quite fast to keep it to the size i wanted. Once it was fairly long, i put some more wholegrain mustard on it and then rolled it around the sausage.

Sorry for the bad picture, but i dont have any more of it before it went into the oven. Anyway, since i was just playing around with these rolls, i decided to fuse the recipes that i had read for the baking temperature and the time. I brushed the top of the rolls with beaten egg ( for the glaze! the glaze!) and then baked it at 200 degrees Celsius for 15 mins, until the tops came out golden.

it was goo-ood.

Getting back to that lovely day in the kitchen. Farhad LOVES jam. The first thing he puts in his mouth in the mornings is something sweeeet. It doesnt matter whether its a biscuit, bread and jam, a mithai, anything. Im exactly the opposite. I dont like anything sweet in the mornings and its milk and cereal for me. The only jam i like is gooseberry ( not currently in season), and sometimes strawberry (in season, but too expensive to make jam with). Anyway, before i started blogging i decided to try and make some jam. It fig jam and it came out beautifully ( i also called mamama, amma and himani aunty for advice at various time of the jam making process!). While the dough was rising and then baking, i decided to try some plum jam.

I cut and pitted about 700 gms of plums ( about 4 cups, once you cut them). I left the skin on, since i love the colour that the jam gets when its cooked. I put that into a pressure cooker and added half a vanilla pod to them. The next time i make a jam, ill probably add the whole vanilla pod - was a bit nervous about adding the entire one this time. Vanilla tends to be a bit strong and can turn slightly bitter if overused.

I added a little bit of water, just enough to cover half the fruit and then cooked it on a medium flame until it became pulpy. Then i added about a cup of sugar.

I stirred until the sugar had combined and melted, and then stirred occasionally on a low flame until it had reached the thickness i was comfortable with. This is the stage thats crucial. Amma had made plum jam once and it was on the flame for too long. It came out as plum taffy. We would have to wrestle with it to get it out of the bottle! Once the jam had cooled i squeezed some lemon juice into it, bottled it and went to bed a happy person.