Well, given the name of the blog, I thought I’d start with the obvious… er… chicken & leek pie! At least it is a pie 🙂
I made my own pastry for this one, which is a bit of a big deal really. It’s something I’ve never been particularly good at because my hands are *always* warm. I made the effort with this one to make sure I kept my hands cold by putting them in really cold water frequently and by handling the pastry as little as possible. It came out very well if I do say so myself!
The innards of the pie were a lot simpler and a lot closer to my regular cooking skills. I make a mean bechamel sauce, if I do say so myself, and the creamy leek sauce for the chicken was very similar, just without the cheese. Chicken is always better with a creamy sauce in a pie, I think… I was always intrigued by chicken in gravy in a pie, but having had it, I now understand why it’s not so common!
I’m going to try and rate the recipes I use in a slightly scientific way. The criteria I’m going to go with initially (it may change as an when necessary or if I come up with something else) are:
Ease – This an important thing in cooking, especially when it comes to trying something new from a recipe off the web. They don’t have to all be like falling off a log, but some level of familiarity is handy in the kitchen I find.
Fun – Some things are just fun to make, others are a pain in the backside! Sometimes food is worth the work… and sometimes it really isn’t!
Affordability – Of course, cost is always a good thing to try and keep down, but sometimes it’s worth spending a bit more for the quality.
Tastiness – Obviously. It has to taste nice 🙂
Obviously, something that’s easy, fun, tasty and cheap is what we’re after, but hopefully with these ratings it’ll be easy (for me at least, since this will hopefully become something of a small archive of good recipes to use without keeping printed off bits of paper all over the place!) to figure out if it’s worth paying that bit extra, or trying something that’s a bit more difficult to get something particularly yummy. I’ll also note if I’ve had to make any changes to the recipe, or if I tried something different with it that worked particularly well.
So, lets see how this goes:
- Ease – 4/5
- Fun – 3/5
- Affordability – 4/5
- Tastiness – 5/5
This is a pretty good recipe from the BBC website for shortcrust pastry. It was reasonably easy, although like I said above, my hands are particularly warm all the time so I had to consistently keep holding them in a bowl of cold water to make sure I wasn’t heating up the mixture too much when rubbing the butter into the flour. I made a slight amendment by using Stork instead of butter (I know it’s near enough product of the devil, but it does make superior pastry) and I ended up using slighly more cold water than is mentioned in the recipe, but that could entirely just be the particular characteristics of the flour I was using. All in all, a very good basic recipe and obviously has far more uses than just this particular pie. Pretty neutral on the fun side of things, but wasn’t horrible either and generally speaking it’s made entirely from store cupboard stuff, so the cost was really quite low. I’ll certainly be using this one again!
Overall rating – 4/5
- Ease – 3/5
- Fun – 3/5
- Affordability – 4/5
- Tastiness – 4/5
Like I said above, I’m pretty well versed in a bechamel sauce by now, so this was something I found reasonably easy, but I also know how long it took me to actually manage a successful white sauce, so I know it’s not the easiest in the world. There’s also a pretty major “make life easier tip” that’s missing from this recipe – heat the milk before adding it to the floured leeks. The heat in the pan is reduced less, so it takes less time to thicken. I didn’t have enough leeks so I added and onion, and the chicken I had wasn’t leftovers, so I simply cubed and cooked it beforehand, but other than that I was pretty faithful to the recipe and it was a lovely rich sauce, and there was plenty of it too. The cost is reasonable, but you do need a good amount of chicken to serve 4 in this pie so unless you’ve got a beast of a bird and have lots left over from a roast or something then it might be difficult to get the meat to stretch.
Overall Rating: 4/5
It went down well all round, and there were 4 clean plates at the end of the day. Ignoring my distinct lack of presentation skills, here’s the finished article tasting far better than it looks 🙂
If All the World Were Apple Pie... 