Toad in the Hole is a classic British dish. I’m fairly sure it never involved actual toads. In modern times, it indicates a dish of cooked sausages in batter and is an easy, hearty dish for a winter day.

I tend to cut my sausages into chunks and pre-cook them before adding the batter. Today’s variation involved also chopping up an aubergine and throwing that in with the sausage chunks. Aubergine is an oil-thirsty fruit and my plan was that it would add some extra veg content to the dish while basking in the fat and flavour from the sausages. That seemed to work pretty well and, once completed by being baked in the batter, the result was very pleasing.

It did stick a bit but I think that was the result of letting the sausage and aubergine cool after cooking earlier in the day before getting to the batter stage. Next time, it might be worth putting them into a different dish, heating the original one up with some more oil, adding the first bit of the batter, adding the sausage and aubergine and then covering with the rest of the batter before returning to the oven to finish.

Why frogs? Well, why toads?