A Pie of Extreme Awesomeness

As any readers of my last post will know, I got a little carried away when I went to the supermarket sans Fiance last week, and ended up bringing home a veritable cow’s worth of beef – some to roast, the rest to accompany the roast leftovers in a pie of significant size.

Wednesday night was pie night, which meant two things. The first was that I would have to face my pastry demons and attempt once more to transform flour and butter into breadcrumbs – a feat I was understandably nervous about after the buttery slop I made last time I tried:

The second was the seemingly impossible task of wrestling the extreme volume of meat into a form suitable for enveloping in pastry. It didn’t help that the dish seemed to be entirely inadequate for the task laid out for it.

Undaunted, I proceeded to start work on the pie filling with gusto (thanks largely to the confidence-boosting lager that I had consumed prior to starting the process). Within half an hour, the uncooked meat had been browned, the carrot and onion had been softened, and all elements had been brought together in an ale gravy responsible for sending delicious aromas wafting through the house.

The next step was pretty easy – cook slowly in the oven and wait for the meat to soften.

So we waited. 

And waited.

And waited.

Eventually I realised that I couldn’t put the moment off forever, and that I was actually going to have to make pastry, or forever be scared of the stuff. All in all, it took me about two hours to muster up the courage to bite the bullet and weigh out the essential ingredients. A seed of confidence began to take root as I noted that the amounts the recipe called for did mean that the Great Apple Fuck Up only happened because I didn’t read the instructions properly, rather than as a result of me developing clumsy fingers that instantly offend all things baked.

The seed grew into a vibrant shoot of confidence as the flour and butter slowly but surely turned into breadcrumbs, and the shoot soon transformed into a giant tree of smugness as water was added and the pastry began to take shape. I placed my ball of triumph tenderly in the fridge to chill, remembering with scorn the lump of stuff I had thrown into the same spot with disgust, merely days earlier.

There was only one flaw in my great pie plan, and that was the timing. We had already waited two hours for me to start thinking about making pastry, so by the time it was ready to roll and bake, it was already 9 o’clock. By the time I stuffed the pie to overflowing with the huge amount of filling and put the whole giant affair in the oven, it was closer to 10.

Much to the disgust of our loudly rumbling stomachs, the pie wasn’t actually ready until 10.30 - a rather disappointingly late time to be sitting down to dinner. But all that was forgotten as I took my first mouthful of pie. It was a resounding success. 

Here is a picture of success:

Look! It even has little pastry leaves for decoration! Although I think, traditionally, leaves are meant to be reserved for apple pies, because apples grow on trees and trees have a lot more leaves than cows do. But still, I was proud of my work and I had some pastry left over, so I decided to show off. As a result, I did briefly consider whether Fiance’s original name for the Great Apple Fuck up would be a suitable moniker for my creation, on the basis that it certainly would be an Apple Surprise.

I guess the moral of the story is that it is much better to just get on with something than it is to procrastinate and put it off. You see, I am proud that I made breadcrumbs, from which I made pastry from which I made a pie of most extreme awesomeness. Once again I am convinced that I am a natural when it comes to baking. I am just a bit gutted that the journey to the pie of extreme awesomeness and the rediscovery of my pastry kick-assness was only achieved after unnecessarily starving Fiance for four hours.

Sunday dinner (and the Great Apple Fuck Up)

I volunteered to do a solo ‘big shop’ at the local supermarket yesterday, after a (partially) unexpected late wake up time made it impossible to shop and get back in time for the start of the football, a task which Fiance had previously requested we attempt to achieve. Given how infrequently he gets to watch his team on TV, and how excited he'd been when telling me about the game's scheduled presence on channel-I-can't-remember-what, I graciously stepped up to the plate, threw my hat into the ring and headed off to the shop on my own. How awesome am I?

Actually, the answer is 'not very'. I'm disappointed to reveal that I made the fatal error of going without eating first. I know better than this – because I know that food shopping when hungry means that I will create a wonderful, yet overly ambitious recipe for every single item I see.

This week, my inspiration was a huge roast dinner, mainly because it was Sunday and it is winter, and that is what people do on Sundays in winter. On this occasion, the big dinner wasn't the ambitious bit - me and Fiance are dab hands at knocking out a superb roast, even if I do say so myself. The ambitious accolade fell to the plan for the leftovers, and to coming up with something a little more adventurous than your traditional bubble-n-squeak. The dialogue that ran through my head as I wandered down the meat aisle went along the lines of: “I know! The left over meat from the roast can be used in a nice pie. Ooh, I could eat a nice pie right now. I’ll get a nice joint of beef, this lump will do. Although… it isn’t really big enough to do a roast and a pie, so I’ll buy some more stewing beef to add to the leftovers. Then we can have a big roast, and a big pie. Would you look at that, the diced beef is on offer – I’ll buy two packets. Hmm on second thoughts, that beef joint isn't going to leave enough for a big dinner today and an even mixture of roast and stewing beef in the pie – I’ll have a look for a bigger piece. Aah yes, this huge hunk of beef will be much better”.

When I got home, I would wonder exactly how I ended up with so much meat.

However, as I meandered around the store, I did not have the foresight to realise that the significant amount of meat already on the menu made a meal of intimidating proportion, and so I foolishly let my stomach tell me that we needed more. Hit by a pang of hunger, and a flashback to the wonderfully huge Sunday dinners I used to eat as a kid, I decided we needed pudding too (yes, this does mean I’m turning into my Mum and my Nan). As I have recently been inducted into the ‘home-made pastry baking club’ – by which I mean I made pastry for the first time without screwing it up, thus convincing myself I have a natural affinity for all things baked – I decided I would repeat my success and make us an apple pie for afters.

Racing towards the apple section of the store in a frenzy of baking potential, I neglected to remember that we only have one pie dish and that had already been earmarked for the beef pie. I remembered that particularly annoying fact when I got home and started considering the logistics. As even my hunger-driven body admitted that we would never eat a whole apple pie after the huge roast dinner, I realised we were faced with a serious crockery based dilemma. Fortunately, it didn't take Fiance long to come up with the winning idea:

Don’t ask me why a pie and a crumble dish are different – something (most likely my natural instinct) told me they are, so I leapt at his idea. Basking in the glory of my singular pastry success, and happy for the chance to prove my skills by fashioning more than pies, I decided the crumble mix would be easy money.

Taking a recipe for crumble topping from the intermanetawebs, I weighed out my flour and butter in equal measures and proceeded to fail spectacularly at turning them into a mixture resembling breadcrumbs.

Either my scales suffered a catastrophic breakdown, the butter wasn’t cold enough, or the recipe was way off base because I ended up with a gloopy mass of extremely soft butter that had consumed all traces of flour.*  I asked Fiance to add more flour, just in case the addition would magically transform the slop into breadcrumbs… but it didn’t.

Despite things clearly not going according to the recipe, I figured I might as well continue to follow it blindly and decided to shove some sugar in anyway – things certainly weren’t going to get any worse. I ended up with what I can only describe as a grainy and sticky ball of stuff.

I have definitely had moments in my life where I have been prouder.

Discounting the graininess and the stickiness and the colour, I figured the thing my creation resembled most was pastry – so I decided to treat it as such and threw it in the fridge to chill while I begrudgingly started work on the apple concoction.

Racing against the clock to get the sixth apple peeled before the first turned brown, I successfully managed to avoid peeling my fingers, and tossed the skinless apples into the butter/sugar/spice mixture that was bubbling merrily away on the hob. Within ten minutes, I had actually managed to conjure up a surprisingly tasty apple/butter/sugar/spice concoction. I lifted my chin by a millimetre.

I retrieved the previously flung un-breadcrumb thing from the fridge, shaped it into a number of patties and dubiously placed them over the apple mixture. The result was quite embarrassing. Fiance kindly suggested a name of Apple Surprise, but I was not to be placated. I duly christened my creation a Great Apple Fuck up.

This is what it looked like:

It was certainly looking rather sorry for itself - so much so, its appearance led me to bid a fond farewell to the natural instinct I was sure I had possessed. Reluctantly, I placed the Thing in the oven while we proceed to eat our delicious (and huge) roast dinner.

Half an hour after we’d finished the main meal, I decided the Thing was as ready as it was ever going to be and took it out of the oven. The situation had somewhat surprisingly improved (kind of). This is what improvement looked like:

And this is what improvement with custard looked like:

Now, I wouldn’t say the texture of the topping was like anything I’ve ever encountered before – it was not pastry, it was not sponge, it was not biscuit, it was definitely not crumble – but it wasn’t too bad at all. In fact, it tasted pretty damn good once you’d picked the extremely chewy crust out of your molars. The apple filling was, even by the high standards set by my bruised ego, very nice. And with custard over the whole thing, I’d even go so far as to suggest it was actually a success, albeit one that I’d rather not repeat.

Naturally, I am now rather nervous at the pastry-making that I must face in order to do justice to the cow’s worth of beef we have sitting in the fridge, mainly because arrrrggggghhhhh what will I do if I fail to make breadcrumbs out of flour and butter again?

Well, actually, I guess I’ll just plow on regardless and hope I end up with another unusual yet hopefully delicious invention. 

* Update: I've literally just gone to find the recipe I tried to follow for the crumble topping (here it is, by the way) and upon a re-read, I have noticed what I suspect may not be an insignificant fact. Apparently, the sugar was meant to be in with the flour before attempting to achieve breadcrumb status. The lack of sugar - an amount equal to that of flour - suggests, to my novice mind anyway, that I did indeed have far too much butter for the amount of dry ingredients I was trying to combine it with. Um, oops.

Ah well, I guess this means I can now say 'bring on the beef pie' and actually mean it.