Four tasty things in pastry

It's 2025 so let's make golden delicious things wrapped in pastry to ring in the new year; here's a quiche, sausage rolls, a pillow pie and a galette to cook this weekend.

Hello!!! Happy New Year! What should we cook this weekend?

Some of us are still on holidays, some are back at work and some of us never left.

But for all of us it’s still summer, it’s 2025 and it’s a nice time for dinner picnics and easy catch ups. So this weekend, what about things in pastry, topped and tailed by a hot honey peach marg, spicy nuts and then rocky road cubes?

So today we’ve got four recipes all using the one pastry, a rough puff that can be made by hand or in a food processor and does well as a quiche, sausage roll, galette and/or pillow pie.

For holidays or any days, you can’t go past things in pastry to feed and delight.

Here’s hoping you had a fabulous Christmas and ‘lull’ (that wonderful in between time). It was my birthday on the 30th, I share the date with a friend and together we hosted a progressive dinner here on the farm last night. I’ll share recipes and photos once the head clears, but for now, here are a few pics from Christmas (at the very end), this weekend’s recipes and all my very best for a happy 2025 full of good weekends spent around shared tables.

Sophie x

Rough puff

This makes enough for one family-sized pillow pie, 1 large quiche, about 6 sausage rolls (as per pic below) or two galettes. And if you’d prefer to skip making the pastry, save a little time and buy frozen stuff - look out for Carême’s puff pastry for the galette, pillow pie and sausage rolls, for the quiche I’d go for their all butter shortcrust.

300g plain flour
210g unsalted butter, cold and cubed
1 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1/3 cup water, chilled

Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and blitz just until the mixture just starts to come together (so you still have some pea-sized lumps of butter in there). Or do this by hand on your bench top.

Lightly dust your bench top with flour and roll the pastry out so you have (roughly) a rectangle about 40x25cm in size. Fold the top and bottom edges into the middle, and then the bottom edge up so you have a thick envelope-shaped (DL) rectangle of pastry.

Repeat this process twice more. Roll out, fold up, roll out and fold up. You’ll probably need to keep lightly dusting the bench top with flour as the pastry warms up and gets a little stickier.

Wrap or cover and place in the fridge for at least an hour before using or up to two-three days in the fridge.

Variation - For the quiche pictured here I used 200g wholemeal flour/100g plain flour which I thought gave a nice nuttiness to the whole thing

Egg wash

1 egg
2 tbsp cream
1/2 tsp sea salt

Whisk together.

Ham and Pea Quiche

We made three of these for a Boxing Day picnic on the river (near Mum and Dad’s place), using up (some) of the leftover Christmas ham, farm-fresh eggs, and a bag of frozen peas from Mum’s freezer. They were a hit.

Quiche is the ultimate picnic companion—a golden treat to slice up with a little salad and some chutney. Add nectarines or peaches for dessert, and you’re set!

Makes 1 large quiche or two smaller, shallow-er ones.