Yup, I've done it again, I've cooked me tea from scratch. I have a massive sin to confess - this is emphatically not a pie! Pies must have sides and a bottom and this doesn't - so I'd go with calling it a pseudopie, or, at the very least a "pie". I'd worked up an appetite so felt some comfort-food was needed, hence the "pie" - I'd spent almost the whole afternoon assembling my Twingle sofa-bed futon for the lounge from The Futon Company - all I can say is NEVER AGAIN! It was appallingly made with slats that didn't really fit the slots, nuts embedded in the wood at weird angles so the bolts wouldn't fit and so on. I literally shed blood, sweat and tears making it and I'm pretty appalled by the workmanship, which, for an item that retails at £450, is awful - I wouldn't expect such shoddy workmanship from a twenty quid Ikea table, let alone this. Having bought it in the sale for much less, I'm not as pissed off as I could be, I guess. I'm not shopping at The Futon Company again - end of story. When I phoned the store, they even told me they're often a bit hard to assemble as they aren't always that well made. Great. The only plus point is that it is very comfortable to loll about on!
This is an adaptation again of a Waitrose recipe, but I've not really made many changes at all really. I upped the amount of soft cheese in the recipe from 30g to 50g on account of slopping too much out of the packet. When I was getting the pastry out of the fridge I noticed half a packet of grated mozzarella I procured from Tesco Express on account of needing something to top a pasta bake on my first night in the haus am meer and I didn't want it to go to waste so I added it by way of topping prior to baking the "pie" and it kind of struck me that all of the flavours in the "pie" were of the ilk that sit well with nutmeg, so I grated some onto the top (with my Peugeot nutmeg mill
, which has served me really well for years now!). It worked pretty well.I felt I needed to eat more greens and so I procured some curly kale and then didn't really know what to do with it. I remembered that my ex used to do something with Savoy cabbage that involved garlic and caraway seeds so I decided to bastardise it and try it with kale and it worked out pretty well - it was really quick to make too which is always a bonus for me and it really gives me no excuse not to eat more greens more often. I ate it with some more of that muesli bread from yesterday, which is still very yummy.
The crust of the "pie" was, incidentally, very popular with Benji Rat, who is sitting on my shoulder giggling to himself, probably wanting more "pie". He's not getting any but he's "helping" me to write this, apparently. I stand corrected - it's actually Frederick Rat - he looks platinum not white under this lighting - will have to get used to that and not misidentify Frederick as his brother again! Frederick's my only white rat so he's pretty easy to spot normally.
The "pie" recipe involved an ingredient I've not used before - a "sauce thickening flour", which I assumed to be cornflour, but turns out, it's not - it's wheat flour that is made from particular wheat cultivars that make for a strong thickening effect sans lumpage. Worked pretty well and it's something I'm going to experiment with more - using in place of cornflour and so on - no lumps at all and it thickened really fast.
Chicken & Leek "Pie"
(Serves 5; I managed to make a "pie" that would give you 4 servings and had enough spare filling to freeze 1 further portion for using at a later date)
(Total cost £9.92, which works out at £1.65 for each of the 5 portions, as a main course)
500g pack of leeks (cleaned and coined)
400g chicken breast chunks (thigh meat would probably work even better to be honest)
250mL pre-mix chicken stock (good quality cubes would be fine)
250mL 1% fat milk (I always use UHT for cooking and keep many small packs in stock)
2 tbsp sauce-thickening flour
300g frozen peas
300g frozen broccoli
50g soft cheese with garlic and herbs
Half a 320g pack of "light" puff pastry sheet
Small handful of grated cheese (I used mozzarella)
Nutmeg
Preheat the oven to 200°C (180°C if, like me, you have a fan oven) and take the frozen vegetables out of the freezer to thaw a bit. Add about 1 tbsp olive oil to a large cooking pot and heat over a medium heat. Add the leek coins and then the chicken and cook for 5 minutes with stirring until the leeks are soft and the chicken has gone white/golden on most of the surface.
Add the stock and then the milk and stir really well and cook for 10 minutes, by which point the chicken should not be too pink any more.
Meanwhile, cut the florets off of the broccoli stems and either discard the stems or freeze them in bags to use to make stock (I discarded them, I couldn't be arsed).
Take the pastry out of the fridge and cut off half of the pack and leave out flat. Once the chicken has cooked for 10 minutes, add the sauce flour and stir well, bring to the boil and cook for 2 minutes with vigorous stirring, at which point it should thicken.
Add the frozen vegetables and cheese and stir really, really well so that the cheese doesn't sit in one big lump and it disperses well.
The temperature will drop quite a lot from the cold vegetables and it will look "gloopy" but fear not! Put it into a suitable "pie" dish. The original recipe called for now cutting the pastry sheet into 12 even squares - this didn't really work for me as they were too big, so I cut lots of small squares and put them on the top of the filling.
The squares should overlap but do leave lots of gaps! Brush the top of the pastry with more milk and sprinkle grated cheese on just the pastry, not the gaps and then grate some nutmeg on the top.
Bake for 25 minutes and have a look at it - it might need 5 minutes more. Strikes me as the kind of "pie" that will taste even better the next day!
Garlic & Caraway Kale
(Serves 1)
(Total cost about £0.35 and it took virtually no time at all to make though I did manage to burn my hand taking the kale out of the microwave!)
50g curly kale
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tsp caraway seeds
Put the kale into a glass bowl with 3 tbsp cold water and cover with a small plate. Microwave at 700W for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a small saucepan and fry the garlic and caraway for 1 minute on a medium heat, not more, not less. Pick the kale out of the bowl with tongs, once cooked, so that you can squeeze out any excess moisture, and drop into the hot pan. Stirfry for about 3 minutes and serve immediately.
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