Austerity Pie

Another leftover-related recipe today, and also what you might call A Pie For Our Times. I was handed some leftover chicken this morning by an Anonymous Bystander and told to make a pie. Mmmmmmm, Chicken Pie, thinks I. Leftover No. 1 was born.

Nos. 2 and 3 were the peas which my Dad didn't eat for his lunch, and the puff pastry which didn't go into Saturday's Tarte Tatin. Add them together, and what do you get? Credit crunch heaven, plus a handy excuse to avoid driving through 9 inches of snow for groceries. Isn't winter Fun.

I actually just winged it today and didn't use a particular recipe, so I'll stick my rough method at the bottom of this post. Where I have used copyrighted recipes in the blog, I've just posted a link where you can find out more, rather than plagiarising. Hooray. If anyone's interested in trying to reproduce and/or improve my recipe, go ahead.

Essentially, cooked chicken, plus some vegetables (I chose peas and leeks, pretty much because they were what needed using up), plus a sauce, plus pastry makes...PIE.

My chicken was cooked already  - the end of Saturday night's roast. All I had to do, then, was sweat some leeks in butter, boil some peas for my Dad's lunch and wait for him not to eat them all, and whip up a killer sauce. Now, my sauces tend to be a tiny, tiny bit hit-and-miss. Since to me the keystone of a good pie is the sauce, I was slightly on my guard - but this time everything went to plan beautifully.

I put together a roux (melt butter, add flour, for any beginners out there!), and added about a litre of chicken stock, whisking the mixture the whole time. Well, probably a litre of chicken stock. To be honest, I poured it in from a jug until it looked the right consistency - smooth, but not watery - and didn't bother with the measurements. I chucked in the end of a bottle of white wine too. Another leftover. This pie is drawing them in like a thrifty little magnet.

The sauce at this stage was nice enough, but a bit bland and boring, so for flavour I added cream and some dijon mustard. Leeks love cream, and chicken and dijon is a match made in heaven, so I was hoping the combination would be a winner. Some seasoning with salt and ground black pepper, and a final quick reduction to boil off the alcohol from the white wine, and voila! Austerity Sauce.

Could I possibly be taking the recession-inspired name thing just a touch too far?  Hmmm.

In fact, this is the only part of the pie which isn't austere, since cream, mustard and wine are all fairly pricey, but it did taste brilliant.

Final stages are easy as pie (oh dear). Leeks, peas and chicken in sauce. Sauce in pie dish. Roll out pastry (which, by the way, I had carefully stored all neatly folded up because it's puff pastry from the Tartes and needs to be folded, rather than just rolled into a squishy ball, to preserve the buttery layers which make it puff up in the oven). Pastry over pie. Optional decorative leaves, berries and so forth cut out from spare pastry, which I always do because it's like being back at primary school. Brush pie with egg. Pie in hot oven for 15-20 minutes. Pie out. Eat at will. So far I've held out, but it LOOKS good...


Recipe for Austerity Pie
A.K.A Chicken, Leek and Pea Pie, if you must.

Ingredients:

Cooked chicken, torn into bitesize pieces
2 small leeks
A handful of peas (frozen are fine)
Any other miscellaneous vegetables you feel like adding, or switching with one of the above
Knob of butter
Flour
About 1 litre of chicken stock
White wine (a glass or so)
1 tsp of mustard
A glug of cream
Salt and pepper
Puff pastry (you can buy this at the supermarket, and it's just as good as homemade. Honest.)

Method:

1. Sweat the leeks in some butter until they are soft, and boil the peas for a couple of minutes until cooked. Pre-heat your oven to around 200 (gas mark 6 or 7 I think).
2. Melt some butter in a saucepan and add a couple of shakes from your bag of flour. Combine and allow to cook for a minute or so. It should be thick but not insanely thick. Use your commonsense. This is a roux. It should smell a bit nutty but not be brown, just light gold.
3. Whisking constantly, add the wine and then the chicken stock to your roux, until the consistency is what you'd imagine having in your ideal pie, or a tiny bit runnier.
4. Whisk in the mustard and the cream, and season with the salt and pepper.
5. Tasting on the way, let the sauce simmer until the ingredients are all well combined, the alcoholic taste from the wine has vanished, and the sauce is the right consistency for you. You can add some water to thin it out a bit if necessary.
6. Mix all the filling together, and put in an ovenproof dish. Roll out the pastry (if you need to, you can get it ready-rolled) and cover the filling with it. Leave a generous amount around the edges, because the pastry will shrink a bit as it cooks.
7. Playtime. Make leaves, berries, flowers, smiley faces, or inappropriate bodily parts out of any spare pastry to decorate your pie. Stick these to the top with some beaten egg, otherwise they won't stay put when they start to cook.
8. Brush the whole pastry top, including any decoration, with beaten egg. If you don't have a pastry brush, it can be done with your fingers. I know, because I have - aah, remember those student days.
9. In the pre-heated oven with it, for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye and don't let the pastry burn. It should be a lovely golden-y brown.
10. Eat your pie. You deserve it.

Christmas Pudding and "Leftover Jelly"

Two recipes today, in a double whammy of a first post:
 
Christmas Pudding...

Mmm...Christmas Pudding time! It's such a peaceful, festive feeling to stir a big bowl of fruity pudding mix with the snow six inches deep outside; in fact, I don't think there's anything better than a warm, yellow-lit kitchen and a snowy view from  the window.

I used Nigel Slater's recipe from The Kitchen Diaries, which is a bit different (if you're interested!) because you steam the puddings for three hours or so before storing them until Christmas Day. That combination of fresh and dried fruit, warming Mixed Spice and bland, comforting suet feels like the first sign of Christmas. Certainly the first in my kitchen anyway! It also makes you feel like a proper, full-on, real-life, Downton Abbey-style cook, and for this reason, everyone in the world should try it.

I was pretty proud of myself, then, when I put the puddings in to steam. My pride was very shortlived. I used some plastic pudding basins with fitted lids, which claimed to be oven-safe and boilable. What a surprise - they weren't. In fact, all the bits above water-level in my bain marie melted. First post, first kitchen disaster, and may there be many more! As a result, I turned out some mildly deformed half-cooked Christmas treats and spent a hilarious half hour trying to peel the plastic lids off to get to the salvageable bits.

Well, hilarious in retrospect.

They actually turned out fine in the end, if a bit oval-shaped - and they smelled fantastic. Spicy half-cooked mixed peel. Total seasonal bliss.

I've stuck them in the kitchen cupboard to keep until Christmas Day. Since it's -4 outside, I may as well have put them in the fridge.

...and "Leftover Jelly"

"Leftover Jelly" is actually partly yesterday's recipe, because it stems from some Tartes Tatins which I made as a present for my aunt (and also an apology for having nearly ruined her lunch party. I pulled out of helping her a week beforehand...oops). I used twelve apples to make two tarts, from a recipe of my mum's which will no doubt find itself up here one of these days, and the juice of an orange to keep them from browning while I peeled them. Result: two tarts (yum) and a load of fruit peel.

Why am I excited? Because I've been watching River Cottage Bites, and I've been wanting to try this jelly for weeks. It's made out of the leftover bits of fruit you would usually compost, feed to the chickens or throw away.

I simmered the peel in water for 45 minutes (most of which I spent hovering over the pan inhaling the wonderful smell) then tipped it straight into a jelly bag to strain. Slightly specialist equipment, but we have one at home because half of our garden seems to be an orchard, so in autumn we make a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of apple jelly. You can acually use a tea-towel to strain it though. I just never have...

I hate having to wait overnight for all the juice, but you definitely get a better, clearer jelly if you do (and NEVER squeeze the jelly bag, folks. It's practically a capital offence).

So we come to today, which was essentially a matter of sterilising jars (you literally just boil them for ten minutes) and boiling fruit juice up with sugar until it succumbed to my will and came to setting point, which is when a skin forms on half a teaspoonful. Simples. Three jars of sticky, gooey, oozing "Leftover Jelly", which is a humble name for a very, very beautiful thing. They're the colour of molten amber, and when you hold them up against the light they gleam like little jewels. I feel like a jelly queen.

Plus, they will taste AWESOME on my breakfast toast.