pie

Masterchef challenge day 23: Tarragon Chicken and Spinach pie, Mushroom Lemon Soup

maki — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:57:06 +0100

Despite being discouraged by the previous day's ingredients, day 23 revived my interest. The ingredients are:

Puff pastry
Spinach
Brie cheese
Leeks
Wild mushrooms
Pear
Chicken breast

Now, I have not bought readymade puff pastry in years. I have this general philosophy that certain very rich foods should only be consumed in its best possible incarnations, because the taste has to be worth the caloric sacrifice one makes. Things like pastries, cakes, ice cream and fois gras fall into this category. The last time I had something made with storebought puff pastry, it was flaky all right, but had a rather dry texture and a very slight acrid, chemical undertone. It had none of the buttery, unctuous goodness that a proper puff pastry should have.

Nevertheless I went to the store to discover what is out there in readymade pastry land, and was pleasantly surprised to discover one that has real butter in it. I know, I am probably way behind the times in this arena. I don't think this will convince me to buy more readymade pastry, but for those of you who are similarly snobbish about pastry but are afraid or too time constrained to make your own, you should know that decent stuff is out there now.

What to make with this pastry? I did ponder doing something sweet, but once again faced with a totally out-of-season fruit (pears and March do not even belong in the same sentence) I decided to do a savory freeform pie. Savory pies are called pastete in Switzerland. This one is filled with chicken that has been gently cooked in a creamy-leeky sauce flavored with fresh tarragon, layered with simply sautéed spinach.

The creamy filling went marvelously with the tender, buttery crust. Consumed for Sunday lunch, it disappered with amazing speed.

To accompany the rich pastete I made a light mushroom consommé with lemon. Mushrooms with lemon? you might wonder, but sour and mushroom do go quite well together. Just think of pickled or marinated mushrooms. The soup is not nearly as photogenic as the pie, but was tart and delicious. I didn't have wild mushrooms (again, the seasonal thing) so I just used brown mushrooms, otherwise known as chestnut mushrooms.

Unused ingredients: brie, pears (if pears were in season, I'd just serve a juicy fresh one with a wedge of ripe, runny brie as a cheese course / dessert).

Technorati Tags: masterchef, mushrooms, pastete, pie, soup, spinach

Mushroom-lemon soup

250g / about 8 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced thinly
Beef or vegetable stock cube, or canned or homemade stock
6 cups of water (if you're using stock cubes; use the same amount of liquid stock if you're using that)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 cup dry white wine
about 1 cup of the white part of leek, finely chopped (you can use onion instead)
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 Tbs fresh parsley, finely chopped
1/2 tsp dried thyme
Butter
Salt and pepper

Sauté the leek and garlic in butter until limp and translucent. Add the mushrooms, and sauté until the volume reduces considerably and the mushrooms are quite brown.

Add the water with stock cube (I find beef works best, but vegetable is fine too) or canned or homemade stock. Bring up to a boil, then reduce the heat. Add the white wine, parsley and thyme, and simmer for 20+ minutes.

Add the lemon juice, and season to taste with salt and pepper. You can optionally swirl a spoonful of creme fraiche, sour cream or yogurt on top of each bowlful.

Chicken and spinach pie

1 readymade puff pastry sheet made with butter
300g / 10 oz. boneless chicken breast, sliced thinly
200ml / about 1/2 pint cream
1/2 cup dry white wine
about 1 cup of the white part of leek, finely chopped
1 Tbs fresh tarragon, finely chopped
300g / 10 oz (well, like 3 BIG handfuls) fresh spinach leaves, well washed and stems removed
Pinch nutmeg
Butter
Salt and pepper
1 egg

Note: remember to keep your pastry sheet in the refrigerator until you need to roll it out.

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 360°F. Line a baking sheet with a silicon non-stick sheet.

Sauté the chopped leek in butter until soft and transclucent. Add the wine and cream, bring up to a boil then simmer over low heat until it has thickened considerably. Add the tarragon, and season with salt and pepper.

While the sauce is cooking, heat up some more butter in a very large pan. Add the spinach; you may need to add it in stages. Stir about until the spinach has reduced to a little pile. (I always find it amazing how much the volume of spinach goes down when it's cooked.) Season with salt, pepper and a little freshly grated nutmeg. Drain into a colander or sieve. Set aside to cool a bit.

Add the chicken to the sauce, and turn off the heat. This is to prevent the chicken from overcooking - it cooks from the heat of the sauce, and it will also continue to cook in the oven.

Beat up the egg.

Open up the refrigerated pastry sheet on the lined baking sheet. Put the spinach down the middle of the sheet. Layer the chicken-sauce mix over the spinach. Carefully bring up the pastry sheet over the filling to cover, and crimp up the ends. Slash the top with a sharp knife, or poke all over with a fork. Paint the top with the beaten egg.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Some of the sauce may leak, but don't worry about it.

To serve, cut into wedges. This is good piping hot or at room temperature.

MasterChef challenge, day 6: Not So Classic Fish Pie

maki — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:22:25 +0100

The ingredients for this day (day 6 overall, and the second day of the second preliminary round) were:

Sea bream
Some sort of smoked fish - haddock? (I couldn't catch the name)
Potatoes
Purple sprouting broccoli
Tallegio cheese

Since I couldn't get (even rewinding several times) what kind of smoked fish they used, I decided to skip it. Cheese doesn't belong anywhere near a delicate white fish, in my opinion, so the Tallegio was omitted.

Sea bream to me is a fairly bland and characterless white fish, that is moderately firm in texture but not as nice as cod, but not meltingly soft like flounder. In other words, a good mid-ground all-rounder.

It's likely that only British people have any affinity to fish pie. Traditionally, it's made with either just fresh fish or both fresh and smoked fish in a creamy sauce, topped with mashed potato. (One of the contestants did make a fish pie, but hers looked like a traditonal one.) Mine has twist in that the fish is cooked in a mild tomato-cream sauce that is flavored with saffron. The saffron flavor is quite subtle but (to borrow the words of Rachel Ray) it makes you say "Hmm? What is that?". My inspiration for this came from the saffron in a bouillabaise.

The key to this dish is to cook the fish as briefly as you can manage to. This means just putting the chunks into the hot sauce right before you put it into the oven dish. Also, the mashed potato part should ideally be very creamy and free of lumps - and you will add a rather scary amount of butter and creme fraiche to it. The creme fraiche adds just enough of a sour undertone to make the potatoes interesting, and matches the sour note in the tomato-cream sauce.

The picture shows an individual size (about 15cm / 6 inch diameter) pie dish. For a complete dinner, I would serve the purple sprouting broccoli (or indeed, just plain broccoli) steamed or boiled and chopped on the side.

Tomato-cream-saffron sauce fish pie

Makes 2 servings. Preheat the oven to 200°C / 400°F before commencing.

For the mashed potato topping:

2-3 large potatoes (Bintje or Yukon Gold are the best)
3 Tbs or more if you dare butter
1/2c whole milk
1/2c or more if you dare creme fraiche or sour milk
Salt and pepper

Peel and cut up the potatoes into small pieces, and bring to a boil from cold water with a little salt added. Cook until the potato is tender.

Drain the potatoes, and return them to the pan and shake until all moisture is gone and the whole is floury and falling apart. Mash finely with a masher, or pass through a potato ricer.

Heat up the milk and butter in a separate pan. Add to the potato mash and whip. Stir in the creme fraiche and whip to a smooth consistency. Season to taste.

For the tomato-cream sauce:

1 400g / about 1 lb) can of tomato puree (not tomato paste)
1 Tbs
200 ml (about 3/4 cup) cream
450g (about 8 oz) sea break or similar white fish, cut into chunks
1 fish stock cube (optional - Knorr makes these but they aren't available everywhere)
1 small white onion
a pinch of saffron
Salt and pepper

Mince the onion finely, and sauté until limp and transparent in a little butter or olive oil.

Add the tomato puree and simmer.

Soak the saffron threads in a little water. Add the whole to the sauce.

After the sauce has simmered for about 15 minutes, add the cream. Season to taste, then add the fish chunks and immediately take off the heat.

To assemble the pie: put the fish-sauce mixture in the bottom of a pie or casserole plate, about 1/2 up. Put blobs of the mashed potato mixture on top, and carefully smooth out with a spatula, trying not to disturb the sauce underneath. If you want to go all out, dot with tiny bits of butter.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the top is very lightly browned.

It's The Season For Shepherd's Pie

maki — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:40:33 +0100

Having spent some of my growing-up years in England, I have a special place in my heart for shepherd's pie, otherwise known as cottage pie. It's definitely winter food though, because nothing is as warming as piping hot shepherd's pie straight out of the oven.

It combines two of my favorite ingredients, well-seasoned ground beef and mashed potatoes. Actually I believe that originally the ground meat was lamb, but in our house lamb was a no-no since my father had a morbid dislike of it. (One famous family story is when he was invited to dinner when we were living in England. He took a mouthful of the roast he was served, and asked his hostess what it was. She said it was lamb, and he promptly and spectacularly threw up.) I don't mind lamb myself but some family traditions are sacred: beef it is for shepherd's pie.

I've made the ground beef part with a lot of variations over the years, but I've settled on this formula as being the most tasty. The key to its tastiness is the slowly sautéed mushroom mixture, which is (when made with butter rather than oil, though it's good even if you use healthier olive oil) a standard in classical French cooking called duxelles. Classic duxelles does not use celery but I like to add a small piece of celery nevertheless.

You can make the beef part in advance, and even freeze it, which makes it a nice easy-assembly dinner; but whatever you do please use freshly made mashed potatoes. Below I reveal how I make my mash.

Shepherd's Pie

500g, or about 1 lb, not-too-lean ground beef
250g, or about 1/2 pound or 1 packet, mushrooms
1 medium onion
1 piece celery stalk
1-2 garlic cloves
4-6 (depending on size) creamy potatoes. Here I prefer Bintje potatoes, in the U.S. I would use Yukon Gold
Whole Milk
Worcestershire Sauce
About 1 cup vegetable or beef stock (water + stock cube is fine)
Salt, pepper and dried thyme

Preheat the oven to about 200°C / 400°F.

Chop the onion, celery, garlic and mushrooms finely. Saute the onion, celery and garlic until tender. Add the mushrooms and saute until the water that comes out of the mushrooms has more or less evaporated. Add about 1/2 tsp. of dried thyme. Add the ground beef and cook through. Add a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. Season a bit on the strong side with salt and pepper. Finally, add about 1 cup of water or stock to make it a bit sauce-like; cook down a bit to concentrate the flavors.

In the meantime, boil the potatoes in salted water in their skins, until tender and you can stick a skewer through one easily. If you have a potato ricer you can rice the potatoes with their skins on; otherwise, peel them (holding them with a kitchen towel) then mash with a potato masher. Stir the mashed potatoes around in a dry pan over fairly low heat until it's dried out. Turn up the heat to about medium, and make a well in the middle of the potato mash. Pour in some milk (about 3/4 - 1 cup or so for this amount) into the well, and drop as big a piece of butter as you dare into it. Now, leave it be (don't stir) until the milk is bubbling and the butter has almost completely melted. Then, whip the potatoes vigorously with a wooden spoon. Season with salt and pepper to taste - keep it on the slightly bland side.

Spread the beef mixture on the bottom of oven dishes that are attractive enough to take straight to the table. (I use round enameled cast-iron ones.) Spread the mashed potatoes on top of this - the potato should completely cover the beef, to a depth of at least 1.5cm / 1/2 inch or so. Score the top of the potato with a fork, and then sprinkle a bit of Worcestershire sauce on top. Dot with as many bits of butter as you dare.

Bake in the oven for about 25-30 minutes until the top is browned. Eat straight out of the oven (have a glass of cold water handy for when a very hot piece burns a bit too much).

Serves 4 normal people or 2 very hungry people.

Rhubarb crumble pie

maki — Fri, 14 May 2004 09:49:00 +0200

Rhubarb remains one of the truly seasonal produce items, only available in the spring. We're now at the tail end of the rhubarb season, so I'm trying to enjoy it as much as possible. Rhubarb has a distinctive tart flavor that is really wonderful, and quite different from any "fruit". (Of course, the edible part of the rhubarb is technically not a fruit, since it's the stalk, but it's treated as a fruit in culinaric terms.)

There are two ways that I cook rhubarb, but this is my favorite. It is so easy to make, and makes a wonderful crisp or crumble pie, with a crunchy topping and a just-sweet-enough, syrupy rhubarb compote-like mixture underneath it. If you choose stalks that are pinkish, it will look quite pretty too, as the one in the picture turned out to be.

You can serve this on its own, or with vanilla ice cream. It 's a wonderful springtime dessert that even people lacking a sweet tooth love.

Rhubarb Crumble Pie

About 1kg /2 lb of rhubarb stalks, enough to make about 4-5 cups of cut up rhubarb
1 cup of white sugar
1/2 cup of raw or light brown sugar
125g / 4 oz. butter
3/4 cup of white flour

Preheat the oven to 200°C / 400°F.

Wash and cut up the rhubarb stalks into approximately 2cm / 1 inch pieces. Be careful to cut off any leaf parts - they are poisonous.

Melt the butter, and add the flour and sugar. Mix to make a rather crumbly mixture.

Put the rhubarb in a pie dish. Cover with the crumble mixture. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the crumble is browned and crispy.

This is best at room temperature, or chilled a bit.