For the past year or two – in fact ever since we realized that going out every Saturday night was no longer feasible because of certain, ahem, restrictions – we have increased the amount of cooking we do. In fact I have made cooking on Saturday night a sort of weekly feature as well as trying to fit it in a couple of others time during the week (but this is New York, so not getting food delivered now and again would be a crime against the local economy).
The other reason for doing this to enable us to influence – and I’ll put it no more strongly than that – what the kids eat as they grow up, and hopefully to get them engaged and enthusiastic about cooking once they’re old enough to wield a knife. Thankfully we’ve got a few years to learn before that becomes an issue, and boy do I need that!
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I’ll be sharing my recipes – or to be more accurate, the recipes that I lift from various books and websites – and letting you know what we think of them. I will try to format them as well as my HTML skills will allow.
None of them will be exactly pushing the cullinary envelope – I mean I really was on baked potatoes being a major achievement about three years ago – and they will all be vegetarian, simply because otherwise they would just get cooked and tossed in the bin!
To kick it off, last week’s effort was vegetable savoury pie from the BBC’s website. The link is here, The recipe is also in the extended entry part of this post, so if you hit the ‘more’ link below you’ll find it. I apologize for not being able to make those pages look like this one, but there you go.
We have a running joke at home that whatever we cook, it always tastes better the day after I cook it. But in this case this actually was preferable on the Saturday night. The stir-fried vegetables were especially nice, but you couldn’t taste the blue cheese that much, despite me putting on more than the recipe suggested. That was probably due to the heat, as you could taste it more the following day.
One element that was missing was fresh cream – described as ‘single cream’ in the recipe. Such a thing is not sold in New York supermarkets. It’s so prevalent in the UK that even our cats only treated it as a minor delicacy. But the nearest I can find to it is whipping cream. If anyone knows anything closer to single dairy cream as they understand it, please let me know.
I’d rate this recipe at about 8/10 and one of the best savory pies I’ve had, although I know I have a better one or two that I’ll cook at some point soon.
Preparation time: less than 30 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins to 1 hour
Ingredients
2 tbsp oil
250g/9oz frozen feuillete dough, in six pieces
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
250g/9oz white mushrooms, sliced
250g/9oz broccoli, broken into small florets
1 clove of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 leek, cleaned and cut into rings
pepper, salt and parsley to taste
25g/1oz cashew nuts
80g/3oz blue cheese, roughly cut up
3 eggs
90ml/3fl oz single cream
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Grease a 28cm/11¼in low baking tin with 1 tbsp of the oil.
2. Stack the pieces of dough on top of each other and then flatten with a rolling pin to cover the baking tin.
3. Heat the remaining oil and fry the onion until golden.
4. Add the mushrooms and broccoli and stir-fry for 5 minutes.
5. Add garlic and leek and stir-fry for another 2 minutes to complete the filling.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper and then spread the filling on the dough.
7. Sprinkle with cashew nuts and crumble the cheese on top.
8. Lightly beat the eggs with the cream and season with salt, pepper and dried parsley.
9. Pour the mixture over the filling. Bake for approximately 40 minutes in the middle of the oven.