Vegetarian Scotch Eggs!

I'm going for the quadruple - one more blog post tonight before I toddle off to bed.

Last week I was looking for a recipe to use some lovely East Coast veg box carrots in a new and exciting way. Coleslaw, carrot soup, and carrot cake weren't really cutting it. I then remembered the recipe on the facing page to the cheese flapjacks I made a while back - it was for a decidedly weird sounding version of Scotch eggs. Weird because they featured no meat, carrots, and oats.

I have to confess that I am attracted to weird sounding recipes. Ones that sound so unappealing make me conclude they must have hidden charms otherwise they'd have never made it into cookbooks. This one definitely delivers!

In case you were wondering, no... I didn't strictly follow the recipe but the modifications were for once not too major!

Vegetarian Scotch Eggs (Makes 4)

Based on a recipe from "Mornflake Oat Cuisine"

• 1tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 50g ground hazelnuts
• 1 slice of half rye/half wheat bread (approx 50g)
• 50g rolled oats
• 2 medium carrots finely grated
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds
• 1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce
• 1 tbsp tomato ketchup
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 4 hard boiled eggs

Preheat the oven to 190C.

Shell the hard boiled eggs, keeping them whole.

Heat the oil and fry the onion until soft.

Put the grated carrots, torn up bread, sesame seeds, oats, hazelnuts and cooked onion into a food processor, and blitz until a uniform crumbly mixture forms.

Add the egg, ketchup and chilli sauce and blitz again to form a paste.

Gently mould a quarter of the mixture around each egg.

Place on an oiled baking sheet, and bake for 20-25mins until golden.

We at these hot for tea with a bowl of soup. They were lovely - very different from the sausagey variety, but just as tasty, if not more so! I'm interested to see how they taste cold - I'll just have to make some more at some point, and let the cool down first!