Chicken and Ham Pie

A chicken and vegetable soup made a couple of days ago was augmented with some diced roast unsmoked gammon from the joint I cooked yesterday.Thickened with a teaspoonful of arrowroot (you can use cornflour instead - mix while the soup base is cold).

Placed in an ovenproof glass dish, along with some boiled potato, and covered with a square of pastry dough, rolled flat, and crimped around the edges. Make a hole in the centre with a sharp knife, to allow steam to escape from the dish.

Preheat an oven to 180 degrees, and cook on the middle shelf for between 45 to 50 minutes. Watch carefully, and turn the heat down a little if the pastry browns quickly. Served here as the pie emerged from the oven. Delicious!

Pork Wellington

A wellington type dish is anything wrapped in pastry, whether beef or some other meat, or which contains a savoury filling.

Apparently no connection with the famous Wellington, and the name does not appear in any recipe book from the nineteenth century, despite the fact that wrapping things in pastry was in vogue from the beginning of the century.

Strips of a cooked pork meatloaf, made with 500g of finely ground sausagemeat, diced onion (two small),  a cupful of porridge oats, and half of a Bramley apple, cored and diced, with the skin left on, and one beaten egg (search on the tag  'meatloaf' for further details).

I made duxelles in an omelette pan with diced red onion (one) and diced mushrooms (three), cooked in butter with a generous pinch of thyme. Duxelles were invented in the eighteenth century in France as a filling for savoury pastries which, owing to the reduced water content, were less likely to cause pastries to explode in the oven.

I rolled the puff pastry to a half centimetre thickness, and added the duxelles mixture, and some of the sausagemeat.strips. The pastry was then wrapped around the contents, and ends were crimped together. The pastry parcels were brushed on both sides with sunflower oil.

Cooked on the middle shelf of an oven preheated to 180 deg C for an hour (watch progress carefully in the final fifteen minutes).

Served here with a four leaf salad, and two dessert spoonfuls of mayonnaise. Fabulous!

Peppered Salami Sausage Roll

Peppered salami sausage and sliced mushrooms wrapped in a puff pastry. Essentially the same idea as beef Wellington. Or you can think of it as a spicy sausage roll.

The salami was thinly sliced (sourced already sliced from Morrison's 'Market Street' section).

The pastry was rolled out into a
rectangular shape, but not too thinly (to about a third of a centimetre thickness). Then the salami and the mushrooms were added, and the ensemble was rolled together, and the ends pinched.

Placed on a baking tray, and brushed with olive oil, top and bottom. The tray was put on the middle shelf of an oven preheated to 180 deg. C. Cooked for fifty minutes (watch carefully).

The trick with pastry is not to cook it at too high a heat. At 190 deg. C, the top is likely to be overbrowned while the base of the pastry isn't cooked properly. Better to cook it more slowly.

Served with a four leaf salad, drizzled with a little olive oil, and tomato ketchup.