Pub Dinner: Toad in the Hole

So, one thing we haven't mentioned on the blog yet is the ongoing Bales dinner competition. Before the broken jaw incident we started a weekly competition of cooking fun dinners. Each week we trade off and generally we eat off the fancy china, cause I mean, when else are you going to? Dinner competitions had a brief hiatus durring the blended food era, but now they are back! Here's my latest entry: 

Pub Dinner

Toad in the Hole

Roasted Onion Gravy

Mashed Potatoes

Oven Roasted Salt and Pepper Carrots

For Toad in the Hole I had to search for a while to find the right recipe. I finally settled on Deliah's which turned out to be fantastic. You can find her recipe here. This week we skipped the fancy china since it didn't seem right to have pub food on china, don't worry though I'm sure the nice dishes will be out next week. :)

The finished product!

As I used Deliah's recipe without alteration I'm not reposting it here. However, since probably most Americans haven't made Toad in the Hole before (we sure hadn't) I'm including some pictures so you can see how it all goes together. :)

prepping onions

and carrots! (I used the recipe I posted earlier on the blog but omitted the dill and sliced the carrots in half lengthwise since they were larger carrots)

Everything arranged in the oven.

We got a good tip in England about making Yorkshire pudding (the bready part around the sausages). Basically you want about equal parts egg, milk and flour. In case converting Deliah's recipe makes your head feel bad, just try to get equal parts in the batter and you'll be fine (this is usually about 1/3 cup flour and 1/3 cup milk for an average sized egg). :)

this consistency is about right.

Make sure the pan and sausages are really hot before you put the batter in. There should be some bubbling hot oil on the bottom of the pan (add some if nothing came out of your sausages, and make sure to get it hot before adding the batter).

While everything is baking (takes about 30 min) you can prepare some mashed potatoes and finish making the roasted onion gravy.

I'm making gravy!!! 

you're not supposed to peak in the oven while it's baking (not good for the yorkshire pudding), but it's hard to resist.

The toads are done!

Salt and pepper carrots

Mashed potatoes!

I've never made gravy before, I'm so excited!!! It was just like real gravy! (probably because it was real gravy? Not sure why I feel like being able to make gravy is such a big deal...?)

Usually dinner competition nights call for wine, but somehow that didn't seem like a good match for this one. Instead, Nathan popped over to the local super posh grocery store to pick up some British beer. It turns out they had a pretty good selection. Both of the bottles he picked up were yummy and went pretty well with dinner.

<><Elizabeth