In this case you can pretty much make experiments and add anything there is in the fridge as a filling and bake it in. Though for me there still are some very simple rules to follow:
- The filling should go together in terms of taste, cause you want it to taste good
- It shouldn't melt way too much in the process, you'll have your filling and your pastry separately
- And it shouldn't be too moist, otherwise it won't bake well inside and might burn on the outside
Now, that's pretty much everything I used this time except for salt/pepper/sugar etc
roll-in dough - 1kg total
broccoli - approximately 400 gr, but I used only half of it for the pastry
cheese (not too hard one) - 200 gr
hard-boiled eggs - 2 pieces
cooked rice - 1 pack of 125 gr
onion - 1 small
mango - 1
apple - 1
some salt, sugar, cinnamon and all-purpose flour
The longest to cook was rice with eggs, so I boiled the eggs and cooked the rice in salted water first. When it cooled down a bit I chopped the eggs, chopped the onion and mixed everything with the rice and voila! - the first filling is done. I really like this one.
My mom loved the broccoli filling, because who doesn't like broccoli and cheese. You rinse the broccoli, cut it in separate small flowers and boil in salted water for about 4 minutes (doesn't have to be all mushy, cause it'll cook extra in the oven).
Then you grate the cheese. When broccoli is done you chop it in small pieces for easier filling and mix it with cheese. Now here are two ways to do it: one, the broccoli is still hot and the cheese melts right away even before you put it in the oven, two, the broccoli isn't warm anymore and the cheese melts inside the pastry while it's baking. I used the second one.
Then I rinsed and chopped apples and mango and made three fruity fillings with those:
- mango filling (this one was sweet, so I didn't add sugar) - mango changes its taste a bit in the oven
- mango with apples - apples are no tropical fruit but they go well together
- apples with cinnamon - classics! - for this you mix your chopped apples with 1 tbsp of sugar and 2 tsp of cinnamon (or less if you don't like cinnamon much)
My little 3 y.o. sister helped me roll out the dough, so making something like this serves many more fun purposes: you spend time with your siblings or children, get them usefully occupied, they develop movements in fingers and learn to cook the fun way. ^^ And then you can be proud of your little helpers.
So, you get yourself a clean and dry working space like a table, where you can roll the dough out to your heart's content. Then you cut or tear the dough in portions, sprinkle the table with all-purpose flour, knead it a bit and use a rolling pin or something round to roll out the dough (my sister uses a small round wooden spinner, the one for pressing berry juice out). Be sure to roll it out evenly in all directions, carefully lifting it up and turning upside down and sprinkling it with flour when it starts to stick. Then I take a round cutting form - a glass or a cup will do too - and press it into the dough to make even round pieces or I cut the dough squares with a knife. And then fill it with all the fillings mentioned above and pinch the edges together. Then they go on a tray and into a preheated oven (180 Celsius) for about 10-15 minutes (depend on how well the oven bakes - in our it takes about 13 minutes for the best result). All left-over dough gets rolled out again and again till there's no more left. I made cinnamon rolls with the left-overs.
And here's the result: with 1 kg roll-in dough I got about 120 small (5-7 cm long) pastries.
