Time to get spooky for Halloween this Monday with severed zombie fingers! The Zombies can’t get you now, we’ve chopped their fingers off so you can eat them with tomato sauce. They’re simply homemade sausage rolls with almonds as fingernails, pasta to look like broken bones, and of course heaps of blood in that looks remarkably like tomato sauce, or is that tomato sauce that looks like blood!

Don’t forget to stock up on lollies at your local Ritchies so you have plenty of treats to hand out when the kids come knocking and remember to always accompany your kids if they do want to head out trick or treating.

ALL the ingredients for this recipe are now available at your local Ritchies supermarket. Find your local VIC, NSW or QLD store.

severed zombie fingers

• 7 Ritchies large sausages (pick your favourite flavour)
• 4 sheets defrosted puff pasty
• 1 egg beaten

to decorate and serve

• 18 large raw almonds (fingernails)
• 2 tablespoons black salt crystals (black dirt) optional
• tomato sauce ( blood)
• uncooked penne or rigatoni pasta (to insert to look like  broken bones)

severed zombie fingers method

Preheat oven to 190^oC. Line a large baking tray with baking paper.

The Zombie fingers are long thin sausage rolls with almond nails.

On a large chopping board lay 1 sheet of pastry between 2 sheets of baking paper (to make it easier to handle and stop it sticking). Roll the until its about 1/3 thinner than it was. Remove the top sheet of paper. Cut the sheet of pastry in 3 even rectangular slices. Separate them slightly on the baking paper and brush each lightly with egg.

Using a sharp knife remove the casings from the sausages gently pull and roll the sausage filling out till its about 1 cm in diameter. Lay a 1cm wide line of sausage meat (each single sausage will do about 1 ½ rolls) longways down the middle of the pastry leaving a about a cm of clear pastry at each end. Roll one side of the pastry over the sausage meat and tuck in under to make a tight long roll. Use your fingers to crimp and tuck the ends with no sausage meat to make a neat ‘fingertip’. Either pull them apart in the middle (so they look as if they’ve been ripped off!) or cut them in half roughly with a knife so they look hacked off. Push a raw almond into the ‘finger tip’ end to make a gnarly pointed fingernail, use a sharp knife to cut lines into the pastry to make the knuckles. Transfer to the lined baking sheet allowing 2-3 cm between each finger to allow for expansion. Repeat with the remaining pastry and sausages.

Brush them with beaten egg and sprinkle each fingertip with a little black sea salt so it looks as if they just dug themselves out of a tomb!

Bake at 190^oC for about 20 minutes or until the pastry is golden and crisp and sausage filling is cooked through. If you want it to look as if there are pieces of bone sticking out of the severed zombie fingers stick a few pieces of uncooked pasta (like rigatoni or penne in the end).

Serve warm, taking care to remove any pieces of uncooked pasta, with dollops of fresh blood, whoops, I mean tomato sauce.

Makes 18. Preparation time: 30 minutes. Cooking time: 20 minutes.