Lamb lid pie

I am against "liddy pie" this is the thing usually served as a pie. A Lid or top normally made of puff pastry is floated on top of pie filling in and individual bowl. The one allowable savoury exception in my book is a hot pot pie. So I made one, having combined it with an idea I had whilst writing another post...

I mentioned lighter ales & lamb when I was talking about steak & ale pie and got to thinking about fruit beers. Being on a touch of an economy drive after Sat Bains I spotted lamb neck at the butchers & decided I'd give the idea a go. I added Liefman's Kriek to my basket.

First I melted & seasoned a bit of butter in my pan, tossed in garden herbs (mainly rosemary & bay) and half an onion and let it all sweat on a gentle heat.
I took most of the meat off the neck chops, cubed it & reserved one bone portion. The meat got dredged in flour  and then tossed into the pan to brown. That job done in went the beer and the bone, the whole lot was brought up to the boil. This is great fun as suddenly everything smells of cherries and your stew gains an excitable pink frothy head. Crank the heat back to a simmer, pop on the lid & go and enjoy yourself. Stews & pies are one of the best things about Autumn & Winter, they fill the house with a comforting cooking smell, the promise of filling food and allow you to loaf about reading whilst they simmer & burble away.

After an hour or two everything should be reduced down and cooked to tender. About 3/4 of the way through Chuck in a handful of chopped potato, you can do this at the start, but you need serious chunks unless you want the potato to just thicken the stew & not be a separate presence on the fork.
Turn the oven on to preheat, about gas 4 and break out the pastry. Roll it out to about 10-20mm larger than the top of your pot. Unfortunately the rim on my otherwise marvellous Le Creuset  pan is to thin to support the pastry so I had to transplant everything into a pyrex dish. Put the pastry over the stew and crimp to the rim of your dish, make a couple of knife slashes in the top to let the steam out and pop in the oven for 30 minutes or so.

I have to apologise for a couple of the recent photographs, they've been taken under less than ideal conditions, usually snatched with a phone cam in low light. Still they should give a reasonable idea of what I'm wittering about.

Michelin star recipe == Michelin star food ?

Of course not, that ought to be self-evident, but why not ?

I think there are 3 reasons

• Ethos
• Training
• Equipment

Equipment is the easiest to tackle, I'm not talking about the kind of molecular gastronomy stuff like thermo-blends & sous-vide units. Most of us home cooks have to put up with ovens that are temperamental or have odd hot/cold spots, our fridges & freezers have to keep the food we need on a day to day basis. Its no wonder when we put them to the precise requirements of haute cuisine they are found wanting. Unless you plan to be a chef or have mild OCD then your knives & pans are probably not quite up to it either.

Training, I can make a fine pastry. To make the kind of pastry that haute cuisine requires with equal amounts of fat & flour takes me hours. Rolling & wrapping meat/fish/veggies into clingfilm logs goes wrong more often than it goes right and well its going to be quite some time before I get the hang of quenelles. I've got a job and a social life that isn't all cooking & cocktails, so I don't have the time to practice, which brings me to ethos.

Ethos. I'm a cook, I want most of my food out on the plate & eaten. I'm not always prepared to cut & chuck good food in order to make a better looking dish. I'm cooking for 2-6 people not a full service 2-3 times a day. I'm cooking for fun (or hunger) not for a living. I'm coming from a completely different place, a different starting point & pretty much ending in a different place.

Ethos is the big difference, I can't really make the investment required to turn out one plate of star grade food. I don't have the time to practice that one dish over & over till it's perfect. And frankly I'm not great at cleaning ovens, fridges & so on, sure its all hygienic but its not enough to coax the constant & consistent performance from my kit.

One day I might by luck & skill combined turn out that plate, but I'm not counting on it. It's not going to stop me buying serious cookery books & attempting the recipes though. I'll just try to be a little less harsh on myself when it doesn't come out exactly as it might at a restaurant.

Why go to all that trouble ?

It is a lot of hassle for 2 meals, making your own steak & kidney pie.

After all it takes about 2 hours (ok you aren't slaving away all that time), pastry is a notoriously fickle product, and there ends up being a fair bit of washing up (not just from the gore-fest that is coring kidneys). I'll admit I could have bought "jus-roll"(*) or similar and made my life at least a bit more washing up free. I could have just bought a pie.

Buying steak & kidney pie is fraught with difficulty. You see as far as I'm concerned a pie has three layers.

1:- Pastry base, no base, its not a pie (at best its a liddy)
2:- Filling, the most obvious one
3:- Lid, made of pastry (miss this off & its a tart or maybe a flan)

Most of the recipes I found where for steak & kidney liddies (yes even Gordon Ramsey, and more shockingly the 2 fat ladies). I had to fettle together about 4 recipes & my own knowledge of cooking meat to get where I wanted to be. Which was a proper pie, baked in a dish and put on the plate as a quadrant of lovliness.

So yes worth the hassle. If it was only to have the kidneys cooked right (ie not overdone shrivelled rubbery things that you end up with from store bought pie(**)). Since the autumn seems to be trying to arrive I forsee more offal & more pie in the future, I might even go for 2 day hot pot.

(*) I think there is half a pack in the freezer left over from custard tarts
(**) I understand that the way frozen/ready meals are sold it means the kidney has to be cooked through before they leave for the shops, doesn''t mean I have to like it though