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 : )

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!