An ungreedy pie

I’m still following Weight Watchers (over three stone gone now – nearly there!) and while there are many recipes that are adaptable for those of us who are shunning butter and fatty cuts of meat and even cake, one thing I am really missing is a good pie.  There is no comfort food like a proper pie with proper pastry – and that means the pastry has to go underneath the filling, not just on top.  Otherwise it’s just a stew with a lid.  My husband becomes most annoyed when we go out for a meal and he orders pie only to be presented with a stew with a lid, I’m pretty sure it would be a divorceable offence if it happened at home.

 This week I really fancied a pie, but I just didn’t have the WW points to “spend” on it.  There was also the fact that we are extremely poor this month due to having just spent more on flooring for the new house than I paid for my car three years ago!  So I had to come up with a pie that was tasty but low in propoints and only used ingredients that I already had at home.  So without further ado, here is my lovely pie; it’s meat-free but very tasty and serves four hungry people, with 11 WW points per serving.  I’m still using my iPhone to take photos as my proper camera is behind stacks of boxes and I can’t quite reach it, but bear with me.

Goat’s Cheese and Lentil Filo Pie

Ingredients:

1 270g package of frozen filo pastry

Olive oil (I use an oil spray)

150g goat’s cheese

100g red lentils

1 big white onion, diced

1 big or 2 small courgettes, diced

1 pointy red pepper, diced

A handful of chestnut mushrooms, sliced finely

1 stock cube (whatever type you have is fine)

2 big carrots or 3 small ones, diced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed or sliced

2 sticks of celery, diced

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp dried thyme

Pine nuts (just a few)

Spray a large saucepan with some olive oil, and fry the fennel seeds briefly over a high heat.  Turn the heat down, and add the onion, garlic, celery and carrots, and cook gently for about five minutes until the onion is translucent.  Add the red pepper, mushrooms and courgette and cook for another minute or two. 

Add the lentils, thyme and enough hot water from a freshly-boiled kettle to cover it all with a little bit extra, and crumble in the stock cube.  Bring to a simmer, cover the pan with a lid and cook for 15 minutes, by which time hopefully the lentils will have absorbed most of the water (if not, drain off any excess).  Season with salt and pepper to taste, and let the mixture cool.  When it’s cool, dice up the goat’s cheese and stir it in.

[While my pie filling was cooling, I went to my Weight Watchers meeting and learned that I had lost another 4lbs in the two weeks since I was last there – hurrah!] 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. 

Now you want to find a clean tea towel, soak it with cold water and wring it out.  Use this to cover your filo pastry while you’re not working with it, because it will dry out very quickly.  A Pyrex or similar dish is great for this, but a squarish baking tin would be fine – just grease it with a little oil or butter first. 

Use four sheets of filo for the base.  Lay out the first left to right, trying to push it into the corners without tearing it, and leave the edges hanging over the baking dish.  Spray or brush with olive oil (or indeed melted butter if you are not trying to be good).  Lay out the next sheet on top of the first, top to bottom this time, and spray/brush with oil again.  Repeat these two steps. 

Now pour in your lentilly goaty cheesy filling and level the top.  Cover it up with the overhanging edges of filo, and spray with oil.  You should have about three sheets of filo left in the packet, and what I do is just scrunch them up and stick them on top so it looks spiky.  You can be tidy if you like, I’m too lazy.  Whatever you decide, make sure you oil the top when you’re done, because this will make it crisp up nicely, brown prettily and taste lovely.  Sprinkle some pine nuts over the top.

Bake the pie for 30 minutes, by which time you should smell it from several rooms away.  You can serve it with whatever you like – salad, potatoes, a big glass of wine.

I’m not claiming that this is a substitute for a proper steak and ale pie with lardy pastry.  It’s not.  But it’s an awful lot tastier than a low fat ready meal : )

FoodBeats - the sound of crab risotto?

If you're anything like me, you probably like to listen to music while you cook (in fact if you're anything like me, you'll sing along loudly and dance around the kitchen). Recently I was asked to have a go at using FoodBeats which is a new online tool launched by Lurpak. It's based around Last.fm and uses Foodily to provide recipe ideas. It's very simple but really quite clever: you just type in the name of the dish you want to cook, and enter a time for how long you think you'll be cooking, and it will generate a playlist for you, as well as offering some recipe ideas and tips based on what you're making. 

Tell it you're cooking something Spanish, and it will let you listen to something Spanish!  Click for a closer look.

I was quite intrigued and was looking forward to trying it out, and I have to say I'm really quite taken with it. I was making a risotto and FoodBeats decided that people who cook risotto like to listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole which suited me absolutely fine. It'll be interesting to see what it comes up with for all the coffee recipes I'm planning! Give it a go, it's really rather cool (and free, which is always good).

Risotto, by the way, is a staple in our house. If we can't be bothered thinking of something to cook for dinner, we almost always end up making a mushroom risotto - it's so simple that even my kitchen-phobic husband can make it without too many tears. Last night I really fancied risotto but wanted something other than mushroom for a change, so after a quick rummage through the cupboards this is what I came up with (and please excuse the Instagram photos, I just snapped them quickly as an afterthought).

Crab, chorizo and roasted red pepper risotto (serves two, but can be easily multiplied)

Ingredients:

140g arborio rice

2 banana shallots, or 1 small onion, diced finely

100g chorizo (the cooking sausage type, not the thinly cut salami-type stuff), diced into small cubes

About 8 roasted red peppers (eg piquillo) from a jar or tin, chopped quite finely

Approximately a pint of hot chicken or vegetable stock

A small glass of white wine (optional, but if not using you might need a bit more stock)

A 170g tin of white crab meat (I used John West)

Olive oil

Method:

Pour about a teaspoon of olive oil into a cold, heavy-based pan (I use cast iron), add the diced shallots or onions and chorizo, place on a medium-low heat and give it a stir. The chorizo will release lovely red oil as it heats up. Let the shallot sweat in the chorizo oil for a few minutes till it has softened.

Tip in the risotto rice and give it a good stir for a minute or so until it's coated in the oil.

Add the white wine, if using, or a ladleful of stock, let it simmer, and keep stirring and stirring with a wooden spoon until the rice has soaked it all up.

Keep adding stock, a ladle at a time, and stir and stir and stir until it's all been taken up by the rice, and the rice is looking nice and fat. I don't measure the liquid for risotto, I just do it by eye, but you're looking for the rice to still have just a little bit of bite to it without actually being crunchy. You can leave it a bit soupy if that's how you like your risotto, or you can cook it a bit longer so more liquid evaporates and you have a slightly drier risotto - up to you. I prefer something in between. 

When you think the rice is just done, add the crab meat and red peppers, stir them in well, and cook for a minute or to just to heat them through. Taste your risotto and season with salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

This is a great Friday night supper - it uses mostly stuff you might have lying about the kitchen and only takes about half an hour from start to finish with not too much chopping up of ingredients - and not too much washing up either!

Random Recipes/No Croutons Required - Leek & Potato Soup

This month, Dom from Belleau Kitchen and Jac from Tinned Tomatoes have teamed up for a joint challenge.


I sort of cheated a little bit, and only picked from my cookbooks that have "soup" in the title or that I definitely knew had a few soup recipes (because I have so many that don't involve soup at all). I ended up with Lindsay Bareham's A Celebration Of Soup, which I was rather pleased about as I've never even opened it - I acquired it as part of a set of books from the Book People, which I really only wanted for the Elizabeth David titles it contained.


Anyway, this is actually a lovely book. No pictures, but that's fine with me, and it contains a vast amount of recipes I actually want to make. Especially as I'm currently stuck in a mushroom soup rut and really need to break out of it. But I suppose that's what this challenge is about, right?

The random page I opened had a recipe for leek and potato soup, which strangely included bacon. As the challenge required a vegetarian soup and as I didn't actually have any bacon, I left it out, and ended up more or less ignoring the recipe and just going along with what I had and how I thought it should be done. Sorry Lindsay... but I promise I will cook one of your recipes very soon and actually follow your instructions.


Here's MY leek and potato soup recipe, in case you need something to warm you up during these winter evenings.

Ingredients:
2 big leeks, sliced
2 medium white onions, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, sliced or chopped
3 biggish spuds, peeled and quartered (I used Maris Pipers)
Marigold bouillon powder, or vegetable stock if you're feeling very keen
A kettle full of boiling water
Salt & pepper
Olive oil
Double cream

Pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a cold saucepan (pick a good-sized one), add the onions, garlic and leeks, and cook over a medium/low heat for a few minutes until everything is softened and going translucent.

Add the spuds, and fill the saucepan up with boiling water from the kettle. Add two heaped teaspoons of bouillon powder (assuming you haven't made your own veggie stock). Simmer until the spuds are completely cooked and starting to fall apart.

I like my soup nice and thick!

Take off the heat and liquidise with a stick blender, food processor or whatever you have. Add a good slosh of double cream and liquidise again until it's all well mixed. Return to the heat and season with plenty of salt and pepper.

Eat with some buttered crusty bread for dipping in. Obviously.

Home made wholemeal bread - my favourite

Random Recipes - Magazines, Cuttings & Pull Outs

Great theme this month for Random Recipes - my stacks (and stacks and stacks) of foodie magazines go largely ignored in favour of cookbooks, recipes from the internet and my own head, so it's great to have an excuse to dig through the magazines for a change.



I randomly pulled a magazine out of a big shelf full of them and ended up with the March 2011 edition of Good Food Magazine - definitely my favourite of the food mags. This particular issue was familiar because I happened to be reading it in the bath and dropped it in, and rather than go out and buy a new copy, I spent about half an hour drying each individual page with a hairdryer. It looks like an absolute mess (I'll update this post with a photo tomorrow when it's bright again as the one I originally took seems to have vanished) but it's a particularly good issue with lots of budget recipes.


I opened it randomly and ended up at a page with recipes for main meals, but thought I could do without eating any more cake so I chose a recipe for lentil ragu. I made the whole batch (to serve 6) and hubby and I had some with pasta for dinner, and the following day I turned the leftovers into a veggie lasagne which was actually really nice. This is definitely a recipe I'll make again.

My version alongside the magazine version!

Recipe [url=http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1139652/lentil-rag]here[/url] on the Good Food website.

Apologies for terrible iPhone photos, the natural light had gone by the time dinner was ready!

Magazine Mondays - Carrot & Bean Patties

Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice, a blog I love reading, runs an event called Magazine Mondays. The idea is to actually use some of your stash of foodie magazines by choosing a recipe every week and cooking it. My magazine stash is getting way out of hand (bit like my cookbook collection, really) so I thought this was a great idea!

The magazine I'm cooking from is Cook Vegetarian. Now we are definitely not vegetarian, but one of my new year's resolutions was to eat less meat for various reasons (being poor, only buying free range meat, trying to be healthier) and I've been borrowing vegetarian cookbooks from the library and I bought this magazine because it had a free veggie curries booklet :) It's actually a really nice magazine, full of recipes you'd actually like to cook and eat and not feel deprived because they didn't contain half a cow.

So the recipe I chose was carrot and bean patties, the idea being that I could serve them like burgers with the sesame buns I made yesterday. I adapted the recipe only slightly.

Ingredients:
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for brushing
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
450g carrots, roughly chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
200ml vegetable stock (I use Marigold bouillon powder, much nicer than stock cubes)
salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 can of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
75g breadcrumbs
3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander (see note below)


Heat the olive oil in a large pan, add the onion, garlic and spices and fry over a lowish heat for a few minutes. Add the carrots and fry for another minute. Add the stock and seasoning, bring to the boil, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes until the carrots are tender. Drain and leave to cool.

Mash the carrots and onions with a potato masher. Then add the kidney beans and mash again. Add the breadcrumbs and coriander, mix well and check the seasoning.


Divide the mixture into six and shape into round burger-like patties. It's easier if you wet your hands. I used a steel chef's ring to make mine perfectly round.

At this point you can freeze them, or chill them for later, but if you're going to cook them, brush them on both sides with olive oil (I use an oil pump spray, which I fill with olive oil), place them on a baking sheet and bake at 220ºC for about 20 minutes.



I made some baked potato wedges to go with the patties, and served them in the sesame burger buns with a bit of rocket salad and some sweet chilli mayonnaise (just made by mixing mayo and sweet chilli sauce).


I just want to show you two of my favourite shortcut ingredients. As I live in a village, I often find it difficult to get hold of fresh coriander and don't always fancy driving a 12 mile round trip to the nearest big supermarket, and I can't seem to keep a growing plant alive for more than a week, so I keep this Gourmet Garden coriander paste in the fridge. It's great stuff, definitely the next best thing.


And the breadcrumbs... well, I never throw bread away. The stale bits go into the blender to be turned into breadcrumbs, which then go in the freezer, so I always have fresh breadcrumbs. And there's no need to defrost them before using. I have no idea why people buy breadcrumbs!