Who loves a good scotch egg? My easy cheat recipe for a healthy version

This has got to be one of my favourite healthy versions of a high calorie and high fat food item - plus the fact its so simple to make and takes minimal effort that everyone can make them and they are delicious hot or cold plus my version is vegetarian too.  I always make a few at a time and keep them in the fridge for lunches or a snack.

Ingredients (to make 2 scotch eggs)

1. 4 Linda McCartney rosemary and red onion sausages
2. 2 eggs
3. Low calorie spray oil

Method

1) Forward planning is needed as you need to take the sausages out of the freezer the night before you want to make the scotch eggs

2) Defrost in a bowl overnight

3)  Boil two eggs and once cooled, peel.

Side comment - boiling and peeling eggs

Firstly, how long do you actually boil an egg for?  I like mine to be medium to hard boiled and have tried all sorts of times / techniques / temperatures over the years, however a complete game changer is my £1 boiled egg timer from Poundland.  I was actually gifted one of these by a good friend in a Christmas advent calendar about 4 years ago and its now a staple tool in my boiled egg preparation and if you don't already have one, get yourself to Poundland immediately!  You basically put it in the pan at the same time as your eggs and it changes colour as it heats up and you can see exactly when your egg is soft / medium or hard boiled.  It loses its colour after time and I'm on my third one now but for a quid, I'm happy to reinvest when needed!!!

Peeling a boiled egg is probably the thing that annoys me most in the kitchen and for anyone who knows me, I took on a challenge during Lockdown One to find the simplest and most effective way to peel a boiled egg without ripping half of it off with the shell.  I tried everything to varying degrees of success and still don't have a perfect technique so am always up for new ideas to try if you can peel an egg perfectly!!!

4) Take two of the defrosted sausages and squish them into a ball in the palms of your hands.  I advise removing any rings you wear before this step as you don't want to be picking bits of squished sausage out of them for days!

5) Flatten the now sausage ball using the palms of your hand and place the peeled boiled egg in the middle and mould the sausage around the egg gently, pinching the joins together.

6) Place the scotch eggs on tinfoil on a baking tray and spray with low calorie cooking spray

7) Put in the oven at 200 degrees or Gas Mark 6 for 20 minutes (turning them over half way through)

8) And that's it.  
Limited preparation, cooking and washing up - a win win in my eyes.
Delicious hot or cold.

To serve

My favourite is with salad (see previous blog post on salads for ideas) sprinkled with Mara seaweed seasoning (my new favourite replacement for salt as I'm trying to cut down my salt intake).

Make them your own

I use Linda McCartney rosemary and red onion sausages because I love them but you could substitute these with any low fat sausages (meat or vegetarian), just adjust your cooking time according to the cooking time on the packaging particularly if you are using meat sausages.

Nutritional comparison 

A standard size scotch egg bought in the supermarket has an average of 266 calories, 16.7g of fat of which 4.35g is saturated.  My version has 177 calories, 7.6g of fat or which 2.4g is saturated.

I hope you enjoy!

If you'd like to receive notifications of when I publish my blog posts, please email me at georginalivinghealthy@protonmail.com and I can you inform you when posts go live.