Supper Onion Pie

A desire for Wintery food has unfortunately coincided with the arrival of Spring in Fife. In How to be a Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson claims that her Supper Onion Pie is ideal sustenance when the evenings are drawing in, it gets dark early, and you need some comfort food to bolster you. Perhaps not the perfect choice for the start of British Summer Time, then? Well, whatever Nigella says, Supper Onion Pie, constructed from caramelised red onions and a cheese scone dough, was ideal for this Sunday lunchtime, Served with a crisp salad and a simple dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I’m not going to post the recipe, since it would be lifted straight from a book. You can find it at the link above, anyway. This recipe is disarmingly simple, though. Caramelise four red onions in a little oil and butter for about half an hour. Make a cheese scone dough. Tip the onions into a pie dish, press the dough out into a disc about the same size as the pie dish, place on top and press to seal. Then bake for a total of 25 minutes, reducing the heat a little after the first fifteen.

Nigella instructs you to cook the onions gently, until they are lightly tinged with colour. This approach could never produce a result as deliciously dark and glistening as the photo accompanying the recipe. I’ve made the recipe a couple of times before and always been disappointed with the delicate colour of the onions that results. This time I went for the French Onion Soup route and was a bit more fierce when cooking the onions and didn’t even go for the non-stick pan. You have no idea how hard it is for me to hear something crackling on the hob and to resist the urge to stir, stir, stir.

Cooking the onions more fiercely means you could probably use an extra one or two.

Meat and Potato Pie

My parents visited last week. They’ve been following the Atkins diet since just after Christmas, so for a long weekend we ended up eating a lot more meat (And cream. Mmmm.) than we had been for a couple of months. But how frustrating it is not to be able to treat your nearest and dearest with really indulgent, comforting food! Couple this with a healthy helping of nostalgia, and I was left with a burning desire to make a meat and potato pie. The kind of pie my mum would have made when we were growing up: tender beef, rich gravy, and a layer of shortcrust pastry just teetering on the safe side of stodgy.

Serves: 2 (1 pregnant woman, 1 Man)

Ingredients

For the filling:

• 1lb stewing beef, diced
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 tbsp gravy granules
• 1lb potatoes, peeled, cut into chunks
• pinch of salt

For the pastry:

• 3 oz plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 oz margarine and lard
• cold water

Method:

• Put the onion and beef in a pan and add water to barely cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, for 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
• For the pastry, rub the margarine and lard into the flour until it forms crumbs. Add cold water little by little, stirring with a knife, until the mixture just comes together. Knead lightly for a minute, then flatten the pastry into a disc, wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge for at least half an hour.
• Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6.
• As the meat reaches the end of its simmering time, cook the potatoes until they are just tender. Drain them, then set aside.
• When the meat is cooked, drain off the cooking liquid and reserve it. Thicken this cooking liquid with gravy granules. You shold need about a tablespoon. (If you were to use a stock cube and maybe even some red wine instead of just plain water when you cooked your meat you could thicken this cooking stock with flour, but I’m making this pie the way my mother would have made hers, and that is, unashamedly, with gravy granules!).
• Divide the pastry into two segments, one slightly larger than the other. Roll out the larger section and line your pie dish with it. The pastry can fall over the edges of the pie dish; you can always trim it later, and it is better and easier to seal the lid to the pastry rather than to the pie dish. Put the cooked meat into the bottom of the pie dish, then pop the potatoes on top, and lastly, add plenty of the gravy.
• Roll out the remaining pastry and place gently over the pie. You can moisten the edges of the pastry with water or milk to help it to seal, and remember to press down, with fingers or  a fork. Cut slits in the top of the pastry to allow any steam out.
• Cook in the preheated oven for forty to fifty minutes.
• Devour.

There are certainly things I could change about this recipe to improve it. My pastry was far too thin and didn’t rest against the filling, so it became a little crisp rather than soft and comforting dream I was imagining. Easily solved. More pastry next time, and plenty of gravy should solve that problem. I sent P. up to the butchers to buy the meat as well, and bought a generic ‘stewing steak’ that I’m guessing might be brisket. I wonder if I might get a more unctuous, tender meat if I used a cut such as shin. But it has been months – no, years – since I’ve had a homecooked pie, so the complaints are few!

Preheat the oven…

Tired of blogging about adventures in motherhood and PhD writing, I recently decided to put my blogging where my mouth is. The one subject I can always rouse myself to interest in is food. More specifically, what I ate for dinner last night, what other people ate for dinner last night, what they’re going to have this evening, what I might have for lunch next week. You get the idea.

Over the past few years I’ve often browsed food blogs for ideas and recipes. Reading about others’ attempts to make an authentic cassoulet is cautionary. Most often I look for a recipe from a cuisine I have little knowledge of. Or faced with seven different versions of flapjack recipes, I do a little research to find out which is the most standard, or which might provide me with something really special.

This blog, then, is just a chance for me to talk about food even when there isn’t anyone around to listen! My heart lies with baking, rather than cooking, but a baking blog might well lead to radio silence for months on end. (See aforementioned PhD and toddler for reasons why baking is sporadic.) So, this blog reflects the everyday things that go on in my kitchen, though as long as you don’t mind, I’ll probably leave out the evenings we have a pizza fresh from a supermarket shelf, or cheese on toast. I can’t promise very pretty photos. The lighting in our house is ridiculous in the Winter months, and food photography is not my strong point. But I know how frustrating a recipe without a photo is, so I promise that there’ll be plenty of eye candy, of whatever quality.