Sunday 1 April 2012

Chicken and Carrot pie with White Wine Sauce


Takes:  About 50 minutes

Ingredient
Cost Notes
3 cups flour 10p

1 cup cooking margarine eg. Stork 30p Butter works well too, but don’t attempt with anything healthy. Blue Flora in particular won’t cook right. If it claims to in any way be good for your heart, you probably shouldn’t be eating pie anyway
2 eggs 35p One for pastry, one for egg wash
2 chicken breasts £2.00 If you’re using funky chicken, scrape any slime/discolouration off first, and fry for an extra five minutes. Classy
3 onions 30p

1 cup corn flour 5p

1.5 cups white wine 40p Plus at least one for the chef. Don’t be fancy here, get out your boxed stuff
4 carrots 25p

1 tub sour cream £1.00 Tasty stuff, but you could try using cream or even yoghurt

Total: £4.75
or £1.19 per person
Method:
  1. Pastry

    • Pre-heat your oven to 200C because we are lazy and cannot wait for slow cooking
    • Blend the flour, butter and 1 egg together with a little salt and pepper (alternatively, rub in the butter with your fingers and then add the egg to amalgamate)
    • Knead lightly until it forms a ball
    • Separate a third for the lid. Roll the rest out to cover the inside of the pie dish- make sure it spills over the edge a bit- it’s going to shrink back anyway
    • Prick with fork, egg wash and blind bake for about 15 minutes. Prepare everything else now

      Still dangerous, obviously
  2. Prepare pie innards

    • Peel and chop carrots and boil for 15 minutes on a medium heat

    • Chop onions and chicken and fry until chicken no longer looks dangerous

    • Drain carrots- put a small bowl under the colander to collect carroty water

    • Put drained carrots in with chicken and onions and take the whole thing off the heat


  3. Pie sauce
    • Create cornflour slop with 3 tablespoons cornflour mixed with 3 tablespoons white wine
    • Pour into chicken pan
    • Add more white wine and carrot water until sauce forms- you may need to put the cornflour back on the heat in order to activate its incredible propensity for forming terrifying glutinous lumps around your chicken. When this happens, add more liquid
    • When a reasonable but boring looking sauce has formed, add a tub of sour cream
    • Stir and season thoroughly, then slop in blind-baked pie dish (suddenly remember you had a blind-baked pie dish in the oven…)


  4. Lid

    • Roll out last third of pastry, cut into an appropriate lid-shape and slice an “X” in the middle to let steam out
    • Have your boyfriend or anyone who is supposedly cooking with you mould the remaining pastry into a retarded version of the animal inside the pie
    • Cut the excess pastry off the sides of the pie dish
    • Brush the linking edges with egg wash
    • Flop the lid on top, push a fork down on the sides to make it pretty and egg wash the whole thing (don’t forget to add the somewhat confused animal or your sous chef will cry)
    • Bake for about 20 minutes or until brown/extreme hunger

      Squirrel? Chicken? 

      Now, cooked!
  5. Plate up

    • Pie can be a meal in itself, but I’m serving mine with mashed potato and fancy broccoli because FUCK THE POLICE
    • Chow down

      Mash and broccoli, because there weren't enough carbohydrates on this plate

      Appropriately dressed for dinner


Monstrous Pavlova Sandwich


Making pavlova is ridiculously easy since most of the time is spent ignoring it. If you're making it for a party (at which it is an impressive yet inexpensive gift), make the bases the day before and whip the cream and assemble just before you go, so the meringue doesn't go soggy.


Ingredients:
8 egg whites (Don't be a pussy about this. Yes, it's a lot of egg whites, but leftover egg yolks are delicious. Make Crème Brulée, custard, lemon curd, or just double them up instead of a normal egg in cakes for added richness. Also, they freeze really well.)
450g caster sugar
2 tsp cider vinegar
2 tsp cornflour
1/2 tsp salt
400g berries
1 1/2 tubs double cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup icing sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
DEM PEAKS


Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 180C and grease two baking trays

2. Whisk the 8 glorious egg whites in a large bowl until they form stiff peaks when you take the whisk out. If you can see froth, they're not done

3. Stir in the sugar a couple of tablespoons at a time, and give it a good whisk in between. Observe how your meringue mix now has a soft shine to it. Fancy meringue


Now: creamy and delicious

4. Remove the whisk altogether and stir in the salt, cornflour and vinegar by hand. The vinegar will make them a little bit chewy at the bottom

5. Flop the meringue in two large circles on the baking trays. Make one flat, and one textured for the top

6. Put in the oven, and immediately turn the temperature down to 115C and set the timer for an hour and a half. Go and play outside



7. When the time is up, turn off the oven and ignore your pavlova some more until it's cool. Don't even take it out of the oven. This is seriously lazy baking

8. Whip up a tub and a half of double cream (or whipping cream, but not single cream. Don't even try, it's doomed to failure) with a teaspoon of vanilla essence, half a cup of icing sugar and some lemon zest

9. PAVLOVA PARTS, ASSEMBLE! Spread cream on pavlova base. Artfully arrange berries atop it. Somehow slide pavlova top onto it to create a delicious pavlova sandwich


10. Chow down
GLORIOUS PAVLOVA SANDWICH MOUNTAIN