Sausage & Potato Pie

It's autumn, so time for pie & stew & hearty warm meals that spend the afternoon cooking.
With this in Mind (and slightly embarrassed that it hadn't been opened in anger) I grabbed pieminster's "Pie for all seasons" cookbook and flicked to Autumn. I found many delights, the pulled pork pie looked great, but life got in the way & I needed something a bit less work. Sausage & potato looked spot on. Potatoes, apples and cider I had from the allotment, so just a case of nipping to the butchers and grabbing some sausage. The pie uses a suet crust, which is interesting, because I normally steam that rather than baking it.

Its an easy make, slice & par-boil the potatoes, fry an onion in butter add the apple & sugar then pour in cider & reduce. Empty the meat out of the sausages and mix it & everything else in a big bowl. Scoop the filling into your pie. Pop the lid on & put it in the oven for 40-45 minutes. If you've a digital thermometer its probably an idea to poke it into the pie to check the filling is done. Slice & serve. It's pretty filling you won't need much alongside it. I reckon its going to be pretty good cold

Next time I think I might make my own sausage meat, that way I can fiddle with the flavours as much as I like.

Main course

I wanted pastry on the menu and the various machinations of the menu meant it ended up here. The 3rd class menu has beefsteak & onion pie as a lunch. Not being totally hidebound I changed it to beefsteak & onion pudding. Since we were on an Edwardian theme I took the liberty of using oysters. Oysters back then were cheap, much cheaper than mushrooms, so were used to bulk out the gravy.This being a dinner party though I added mushrooms too for a super luxury pudding.

I cook the steak for an hour or so with herbs & onion plus some port to get it tender. Brown off the kidneys and add them to the steak mix. Chop the oysters & mushrooms, stir into the now steak & kidney mix. Ladle the lot into a nice suet pastry crust. Seal the lid on and then steam for an hour or two (about 90 mins is fine for a 750ml pudding). Because I couldn't find a large pudding bowl I made 3 small puddings (should have made 4, one for each funnel). Which turned out to be about right.
The oysters & the mushrooms dissolved into the gravy, giving a nice rich taste & texture, just the thing for a cold night.
I served them up with Mash & veg and it seemed about the right potion size for everyone (at least I didn't get any complaints, just 11 clean plates).
I think I'll be adding oysters again in future as they definitely bring a certain something to the dish.

Tarte Tatin

Windfall apples, what to do ? A quick glimpse at Family Food suggested Tarte tatin, after all what could be nicer than a caramel apple pie ?

For some reason I'd never realized that tarte tatin is cooked upside down, the recipe also called for frozen puff pastry. I skipped that as I was making my own shortcrust for some other bits.

First off came lining the bottom of the dish with 100gr of butter. Then I sprinkled 80gr of sugar over that (Depends a bit on how sweet the apples are). Then I cut some wedges from my apples. This is great for windfalls as you can chuck the less good bits of the apple.

Once it's all set up put it on the hob at a medium heat & watch the butter melt & the sugar begin to caramelize. At this point the recipe suggested putting a plat over the apples to make sure they got nicely covered.

I looked at several pictures on the web and the apples are really deeply caramelized, to a very dark brown. I didn't go that far, taking it off the hob when everything was golden. Now came the tricky sounding part. Next time I make this (and its not going to be too long before I do) I'll roll the pastry & measure it first, it can rest at the right size.

I dropped it over the apples & tucked it in as best I could. You can see bits of buttery caramel escaping up the sides. So it wasn't going to be the worlds best looking tarte tatin (I think that goes to those with the regular spiral of thin apple slices), but hopefully it was going to taste OK. With that it went into the oven on Gas mark 4 for 30-40mins (depends on the oven, whether you've pre-heated it and all those other factors).

Then comes the nailbiting section, turning it out. Place a plate over your flan dish & quickly invert, perform what ever voodoo you regard as acceptable & tap the flan dish, if everything is going you way you'll hear a flopping sound & then the big reveal.

Eat with cream, or ice cream (I like ice cream when the tart is warm & cream when its cold). The next day I was idly poking around the internet and several websites suggested that Tatin was a difficult thing and reading some of the recipes I'm not surprised. This was pretty straight forward, and if you aren't good at pastry, Jus-roll and similar work fine. If you've an abundance of apples this is worth a go, and the anxiety of turning out hot caramel is always a spice to an afternoon in the Kitchen.

Sausage plait

I'm having a ind of dinner party thing next weekend, and I've been wanting to make a beef wellington for ages. However puff pastry is involved & since I've been making shortcrust variations recently I thought I might be tempting fate with a whole heap of hubris. As they say practice makes perfect, but what to make with my puff pastry ? How about a cheap version of the beef ? A sausage plait is one of those English dishes that is cheap filling & great hot or cold. You can go the Delia route and stir onions into store sausage (or force) meat  then wrap it up in Jus-roll or similar or you can go the whole hog & make it from scratch.
Sausage meat can't be that hard can it ? Apparently not, its meat (pork is my choice),fat, spices & filler. I asked the butcher about the meat and he recommended a mix of shoulder & belly & make sure I used the fat.

That's it diced ready to go through the mincer. The question of filler is a vexed one, but several bits of reading pointed to breadcrumbs being necessary to get the required sausagey (actually "banger") texture, so I blitzed a slice of stale bread & some garden sage, with a teaspoon of colemans mustard and then stirred it into the meat before running it through the mincer a second time. I now had reasonable sausage meat, into the fridge it goes to rest & firm up. Time to sort out the puff pastry. A couple of easy recipes for what is technically a rough puff pastry are simple to get hold of. Though I disagree with Gordon Ramsey about pie, he knows what he is doing and his pastry looked like a reasonable job. With puff pastry, the rolling & folding to create layers is pretty important, I actually added a couple of extra roll & fold steps figuring it'd do no harm. I left that to rest whilst I turned my sausage meat into plait filling with some onion and a geneous splash of "King of Oudh's" sauce (its a posh version of lea & perrin's with a fruitier taste & a touch less pepperiness). Then it was time to roll out the plait and get the meat into it.

I found I had a little too much of everything to make a manageable plait, so I trimmed things off to make sausage rolls with the left overs. Then came the plaiting. I really am not good at this kind of thing & the book wasn't much help (simply work left to right creating a plait along the meat).
So the plaiting was well pretty wonky (thank goodness thats not going to be needed for the wellington as it does distract at least a little from the dish). My oven is a bit random at times and having done a bit of cooking earlier the suggested gas 8 was a bit full on for the pastry, so Iturned it back & used my trusty Fantast to let me know when the pork had reached a reasonable temperature. Once it was done I let it rest whilst I steamed some leeks & mashed some potato to go with it. It turned out pretty well for a hot & filling supper, plus there is enough to eat cold for lunch at work tomorrow, which will be pretty nice.

 

Like I said, a little wonky but very tasty.