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ventaThe trouble with not getting round to writing on LJ is that I store up things in my head which I intend to write. So I'd like to tell you about my recent holiday, but first I want to write about the epic pie I made a week or two ago. But I also intended to write about seeing Veronica Falls live, and I meant to tell you about Whitby goth weekend, and was keen to mention seeing PWEI before that...
Anyway. I can't help noticing that the only way to move forward is to bite the bullet, mix the metaphor, and get on with it. In summary: Veronica Falls are brilliant, kind of indie pop with a bit of a My Bloody Valentine fuzz, and you should check them out. They were supported by the Dum Dum Girls who are also pretty good, and their lead sinder is audibly indistinguishable from the Chrissie Hynde.
WGW was a bit of a departure this year,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
keris, davefish and I (having carelessly mislaid our usual flat) moved into a large house with ceb, damerell and Heather (WINOLJ, AFAIK). They all turned out to be lovely housemates, and even the bands in the Spa turned out to be enjoyable. I had no idea that the advertised "Chameleons Vox" were a reconstituted version of the band I know as The Chameleons, which was a splendid thing to discover.
And PWEI? Well, we partied like it was 1995. Despite retaining only about one original member, PWEI are still jumping about the stage, yelling, like it's 1995.
So, about that pie. Under the following cut are some fairly graphic pictures of the animal parts which went into making my pork pie.
I was following a recipe from Rose Prince's New English Table, which is a jolly fine book. I'd been wanting to try it out for ages, and was just looking for an excuse.
So, the first thing to do is start boiling up things for stock. Reduced and cooled, this will form the "jelly" part of the pork pie.
Meat ingredients for the stock:
I wasn't sure whether it'd be easy to find pigs' trotters, but it turns out the butcher is very happy to provide them given a bit of warning. I imagine trotters are usually chucked away; because I didn't get an itemised bill, I'm not sure if I was charged for them or the bones (I suspect not).
Vegetable ingredients for the stock:
And I got that on to boil...
Meanwhile, I set on trimming and chopping up the constituent parts of the filling.
I'd ordered "2 1/4 lbs boned duck leg meat", but forgotten to specify that I also wanted it skinned. At least, I don't mind doing the skinning myself, but I want to end up with a couple of pounds of meat. Duck is so incredibly fatty, that by the time I'd skinned and trimmed it, I was down to just over a pound of meat.
Meat ingredients for the filling:
That's minced pork shoulder, diced pork shoulder, chopped duck leg, and diced smoked gammon. At least, allgedly it was smoked gammon. I have a strong suspicion that the piece the butcher had packed up for me was actually unsmoked.
Vegetable ingredients for the filling:
Technically the fennel seeds and so on were also vegetable, but the only fresh veg involved was chopped sage. That was all mixed up together, and went into the fridge with a glass of wine to marinate.
The pastry... well, it daunted me slightly. Two pounds of flour? I guess it's not that much in the circs. More pastry than I've ever made at once, though. It's supposed to be made with a frankly phenomenal quantity of butter, but a few people at the party I was taking it to are dairy-allergic[*], so I had to make do with Stork.
Action shot!
I got to the "breadcrumb" stage by hand... (why yes that is my glass of wine in the background - I only needed "a glassful" for the recipe, I had to do something with the rest)
... then decided that hey, I live in the 21st century and someone else could do the damn work.
My goodness me, what a lot of pastry (flour bag included for scale).
Fast forward a bit, and I rolled out the pastry lined a 10" cake tin, and lined that with streaky bacon. It's surprisingly difficult to find 10" cake tins. Robert Dyas appears to be the answer round our way.
T'instructions for the pie then reckoned I should pile in the filling, making it into a "nice, rounded shape" at the top. Well. Presumably due to duck leg incidents mentioned above (ie not having quite enough duck leg meat, if you missed that bit) I didn't have enough filling for a nice, rounded shape. I figured a nice, flat shape would probably be fine. I slapped a layer of pastry on the tope, and popped it in the oven.
The stock, meanwhile, had been simmered, strained, cooled and had, if you will excuse the phrase, set like a bastard. Once the pie was out the oven and cooled down, I warmed the stock very gently to persuade it to be runny enough to go through a funnel into a pie.
One obvious downside: I don't own a funnel. Certainly not a small, cute funnel suitable for pouring stock into pies. However, I watched Blue Peter as a child and I had a yoghurt pot...
At this point, it suddenly became apparent that the "nice, rounded shape" was more important than I'd realised. You see... when you cook the pie, the filling shrinks a little. There is space at the edges, and the nice, rounded shape allows the stock poured in through the little pastry chimney to trickle down nicely into the gaps.
If the top of your pie is flat, the stock doesn't go anywhere. It sort of fills up the chimney and, without encouragement from gravity, spills all over the top of the pie. After several attempts, I was forced to concede that the lovely, lovely stock-jelly I'd spend such a lot of time and effort making wasn't going to be used.
(The resulting demoralisation is largely the reason for the absence of a triumphal "finished pie" photo.)
Of course, if I'd just not spent ages looking for the 10" cake tin the recipe reckoned was necessary and used the 8" one I already had, I would have ended up with a beautiful domed pie.
However, the pie went to the party, and people liked it, and lots of people tactfully said ha, well I don't like the jelly anyway. Due to there being lots of food, and it being a very big pie, quite a chunk of it came home and got eaten cold with pickles and such.
The gappy edges did make it a bit lacking in structural integrity, so it had a bit of a tendency to collapse when sliced. I failed to take an exciting and glamorous slice of pie photo, so here is a slightly collapsed-looking one instead:
It tasted bloody good, collapsed or otherwise :)
[*] I do usually try to make my food edible to everyone present. However, just for once I told the guy who eats kosher that he'd better just stay away from my pie. We were at a pie-party, he had 11 other pies to choose from.
Addendum
In a spirit of reporting accuracy, I should point out that actually Veronica Falls were the support act. They happened to be the band I wanted to see, but Dum Dum Girls were the headliners. This is the kind of thing which causes arguments in our house in later years, and LJ tends to get used as an arbiter of what happened :)
Anyway. I can't help noticing that the only way to move forward is to bite the bullet, mix the metaphor, and get on with it. In summary: Veronica Falls are brilliant, kind of indie pop with a bit of a My Bloody Valentine fuzz, and you should check them out. They were supported by the Dum Dum Girls who are also pretty good, and their lead sinder is audibly indistinguishable from the Chrissie Hynde.
WGW was a bit of a departure this year,
keris, davefish and I (having carelessly mislaid our usual flat) moved into a large house with ceb, damerell and Heather (WINOLJ, AFAIK). They all turned out to be lovely housemates, and even the bands in the Spa turned out to be enjoyable. I had no idea that the advertised "Chameleons Vox" were a reconstituted version of the band I know as The Chameleons, which was a splendid thing to discover.And PWEI? Well, we partied like it was 1995. Despite retaining only about one original member, PWEI are still jumping about the stage, yelling, like it's 1995.
So, about that pie. Under the following cut are some fairly graphic pictures of the animal parts which went into making my pork pie.
I was following a recipe from Rose Prince's New English Table, which is a jolly fine book. I'd been wanting to try it out for ages, and was just looking for an excuse.
So, the first thing to do is start boiling up things for stock. Reduced and cooled, this will form the "jelly" part of the pork pie.
Meat ingredients for the stock:
I wasn't sure whether it'd be easy to find pigs' trotters, but it turns out the butcher is very happy to provide them given a bit of warning. I imagine trotters are usually chucked away; because I didn't get an itemised bill, I'm not sure if I was charged for them or the bones (I suspect not).
Vegetable ingredients for the stock:
And I got that on to boil...
Meanwhile, I set on trimming and chopping up the constituent parts of the filling.
I'd ordered "2 1/4 lbs boned duck leg meat", but forgotten to specify that I also wanted it skinned. At least, I don't mind doing the skinning myself, but I want to end up with a couple of pounds of meat. Duck is so incredibly fatty, that by the time I'd skinned and trimmed it, I was down to just over a pound of meat.
Meat ingredients for the filling:
That's minced pork shoulder, diced pork shoulder, chopped duck leg, and diced smoked gammon. At least, allgedly it was smoked gammon. I have a strong suspicion that the piece the butcher had packed up for me was actually unsmoked.
Vegetable ingredients for the filling:
Technically the fennel seeds and so on were also vegetable, but the only fresh veg involved was chopped sage. That was all mixed up together, and went into the fridge with a glass of wine to marinate.
The pastry... well, it daunted me slightly. Two pounds of flour? I guess it's not that much in the circs. More pastry than I've ever made at once, though. It's supposed to be made with a frankly phenomenal quantity of butter, but a few people at the party I was taking it to are dairy-allergic[*], so I had to make do with Stork.
Action shot!
I got to the "breadcrumb" stage by hand... (why yes that is my glass of wine in the background - I only needed "a glassful" for the recipe, I had to do something with the rest)
... then decided that hey, I live in the 21st century and someone else could do the damn work.
My goodness me, what a lot of pastry (flour bag included for scale).
Fast forward a bit, and I rolled out the pastry lined a 10" cake tin, and lined that with streaky bacon. It's surprisingly difficult to find 10" cake tins. Robert Dyas appears to be the answer round our way.
T'instructions for the pie then reckoned I should pile in the filling, making it into a "nice, rounded shape" at the top. Well. Presumably due to duck leg incidents mentioned above (ie not having quite enough duck leg meat, if you missed that bit) I didn't have enough filling for a nice, rounded shape. I figured a nice, flat shape would probably be fine. I slapped a layer of pastry on the tope, and popped it in the oven.
The stock, meanwhile, had been simmered, strained, cooled and had, if you will excuse the phrase, set like a bastard. Once the pie was out the oven and cooled down, I warmed the stock very gently to persuade it to be runny enough to go through a funnel into a pie.
One obvious downside: I don't own a funnel. Certainly not a small, cute funnel suitable for pouring stock into pies. However, I watched Blue Peter as a child and I had a yoghurt pot...
At this point, it suddenly became apparent that the "nice, rounded shape" was more important than I'd realised. You see... when you cook the pie, the filling shrinks a little. There is space at the edges, and the nice, rounded shape allows the stock poured in through the little pastry chimney to trickle down nicely into the gaps.
If the top of your pie is flat, the stock doesn't go anywhere. It sort of fills up the chimney and, without encouragement from gravity, spills all over the top of the pie. After several attempts, I was forced to concede that the lovely, lovely stock-jelly I'd spend such a lot of time and effort making wasn't going to be used.
(The resulting demoralisation is largely the reason for the absence of a triumphal "finished pie" photo.)
Of course, if I'd just not spent ages looking for the 10" cake tin the recipe reckoned was necessary and used the 8" one I already had, I would have ended up with a beautiful domed pie.
However, the pie went to the party, and people liked it, and lots of people tactfully said ha, well I don't like the jelly anyway. Due to there being lots of food, and it being a very big pie, quite a chunk of it came home and got eaten cold with pickles and such.
The gappy edges did make it a bit lacking in structural integrity, so it had a bit of a tendency to collapse when sliced. I failed to take an exciting and glamorous slice of pie photo, so here is a slightly collapsed-looking one instead:
It tasted bloody good, collapsed or otherwise :)
[*] I do usually try to make my food edible to everyone present. However, just for once I told the guy who eats kosher that he'd better just stay away from my pie. We were at a pie-party, he had 11 other pies to choose from.
Addendum
In a spirit of reporting accuracy, I should point out that actually Veronica Falls were the support act. They happened to be the band I wanted to see, but Dum Dum Girls were the headliners. This is the kind of thing which causes arguments in our house in later years, and LJ tends to get used as an arbiter of what happened :)
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-13 09:59 pm (UTC)I've currently got eight trotters in the freezer, earmarked for various recipes. Much to my amazement, they charged a massive 15p each.
Apparently it was previously 10p, but there's a bloke round the corner who has dogs that like them, so the butchers felt they could go for a small price increase... :-)
Pork pie is definitely on my list of things to try making.
I've got Rose Prince's New English Kitchen (next to me on the sofa when I read this, oddly...) but not New English Table, so was planning on trying the River Cottage Meat version...
(Also plotting brawn at some point, which may be a step too far, but we'll see...)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 09:54 am (UTC)There is an embargo on new cookery books in my kitchen at present, though!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 02:24 pm (UTC)Just an embargo on me buying them for myself :)