Week 3 - Chicken, Pea and Mushroom Pie

Thursday 15th/Friday 16th October

This recipe comes from Leiths Simple Cookery by Viv Pidgeon and Jenny Stringer, p. 224.

Accompanied by: N/A

Liquor: Ale, of course!

Difficulty: Touching your toes. While you're sitting on the couch.

This week's meal had two requirements:

1) Can be done in two parts
2) Can be done quickly

My wife had some friends coming over for the weekend, so my usual window was curtailed, and moved earlier in the week.

Fortunately, this simple pie has the "filling" part, which can then be cooled, and the "baking" part, where some puff-pastry is placed over the filling, and it's all cooked together.

My wife handled the puff-pastry, as she likes making it pretty with stars and what-not, and I handled the filling because, well, that's the cooking bit.

It was also a perfect recipe to use up the dribble of chicken stock I'd gotten from the roast chicken: the recipe calls for 200 ml, and I had about 250.

Of course, a pie isn't a pie without "qualiteh" ingredients.

Finest Iberico, rare-breed ham-in-a-can:


With liberal splashings of a fine White:


Collected together, everything you need for tonight's fine pie:


The actual making of the pie was really quite straightforward, and proceeded largely without incident.

Largely.

If you'll remember from the roast-chicken post, I only had an onion to reduce with the chicken.

Well, that was evident in the final pie filling. Onion-y. Really onion-y. I thought I'd over-seasoned (as I often do), but it was simply the overwhelming flavour of onion.

Fortunately, I added a fair amount of milk to get the consistency right (the recipe called for a good coating-consistency. This is the point at which the sauce will coat and cling to the other ingredients in the pie. A simple rule-of-thumb is that when it sticks to the back of the spoon, and leaves a clear line on said spoon-back when you draw your finger across it, it's ready. The milk had the added benefit of working to dilute the onion flavour a bit, I think.

Next time, if I have onion-y stock, I won't use a whole onion in the recipe. Also, I do think pepper in preference to salt may affect the balance positively next time.

When it's done, you sould have something like this (note we don't have a proper pie-tray):


And after your wife or other artistically-inclined cohort/personality is done with the puff-pastry, and you've baked it (in our case, the next day, after refrigerating the filling overnight), it should look something like this:


Finally, the perfect plate of food:


Although, as I said earlier, it was strongly onion-y. Tasted better hot than cold, but that's just a niggle, since cold pie is goood.

Next week: Home-made pasta!