last night's pie

Last night I decided to make a chicken pie. My usual pie co-conspirators were incredibly hung over after a night of doing rolly polly's down hills and ordering vegetarian Big Macs, so it was all down to me.

I'd been at the movies with my Nana and was full to the brim of Nana-ish tips and pieces of pie wisdom which I proceeded to ignore and thusly make a pie that did not live up to its potential. Although, to be fair, everyone said it tasted very nice.

The pie: as per usual, spent a bloody long time cooking up onion, garlic and some chopped celery and a tiny bit of spring onion - just so that we had all the roots covered. Cooked them, added some bay leaves, then some white wine (too much) and then the chicken pieces (free-range, on sale at the super, hurrah!), cooked them off, then chucked in some chopped carrot, courgette, and mushrooms. Let that cook with a lid on so the mushies juices came out, and then added some chicken stock that we had wisely made after having a roast.

A note: this pie was not made according to any recipe. And I was tired and upset after seeing Alec Baldwin topless so much in the movie. So I did everything on the fly and in the wrong order but it wound up tasting really nice. Moving on.

Once the stock had cooked down a bit, I added some marscapone we had lying around, grated parmesan and chopped basil. Perhaps the marscapone sounds like a wierd addition, but it gave the gravy bit of the pie a bit of creaminess. Then I poured that into the pie dish,we put a puff pastry lid on top, made a decorative rose for the lid out of the leftover pastry, and into the oven it went for about 20 minutes.

END PIE.

PS.

This week has been a bit of a boon, vege-box wise.

We made a cabbage and potato soup (not as soviet food shortage as it sounds), which was oddly comforting and stomach-clarity giving, if you know what I mean. I barely do. Anyway, it was refreshing and made us feel healthy. I highly recommend cabbage and the cooking of it in soups (leek/onion/garlic/bay leaves/stock or water/potatoes which are a bit mashed up/chopped cabbage/chorizo).