Pie goals...nailed it!

By popular demand…..here are the three recipes I combined to make a Mince & Onion pie with a twist.

As I said in my insta post….I’m trying to find new things for an alternative Sunday lunch, a roast every weekend becomes a bit boring.

I love a Sunday lunch, first off it’s Sunday which is normally a chilled relaxing day in our house so I have time to do what I love, cooking.

I wanted to make a pie that had a dumpling topping, I couldn’t find a recipe I wanted to use, so I took the three elements of the pie and found a recipe for each part and just added them together.

Pastry recipe -

Kept it simple with a BBC recipe. I added 2 teaspoons of Coleman’s English Mustard to the mix half way through.

This made over the quantity I needed to make just the base or case, but not by so much you need to make less than the recipe requires (I made a couple of cheese twists with the left over by literally grating some cheese in the left over pastry and baking)

Pie filling -

This pie recipe on its own, although I’ve not made the complete pie sounds like a good recipe.

Of course I didn’t follow it though……that why I like cooking not baking, you can’t really play to much with baking but with cooking your got more scope to play around with the recipe.

I substituted Beef for Turkey mince (Adrian can’t eat beef) because I use turkey mince. I do add a Knorr rich beef stock cube when breaking up the mince to add some flavour to the mince.

I like my cooked mince fine so I really break and stir it when browning.

I did one small onion and 4 shallots and 3 cloves of smoked garlic but normal garlic is good.

As I’d already added stock to the mince I didn’t add the 200ml that the recipe requires, instead I added red wine for a bit more depth with a couple of teaspoons of mustard (I did think horseradish might be nice, but I’d used mustard in the pastry so stuck with mustard)

The pie takes 35-40 minutes to cook but the dumplings only take 15/20. I cooked the pie for 20 minutes in the oven without the dumplings, I didn’t want the mince mix to dry out so I topped with a sheet of baking paper that I’d cut out.

The dumplings -

• 100g self raising flour

• 50g vegetable or beef suet

• 100g grated mature cheddar cheese

• 1tbs chopped fresh chives***

• 75g ice cold water

• Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper
  

**I used dried as that’s all I had. I doubled the quantity.

Weigh the flour, suet, chopped chives, grated cheddar cheese, salt and pepper into a mixing bowl, mix well. Add the ice cold water and mix quickly, do not knead the dough as it will become heavy.

Divide in to 16 mini dumplings.

I took the pie out of the oven. Removed the baking paper and added the dumplings to the top. I used the rest of the egg wash I used for the rim of the pastry case to egg wash the dumplings.

Cooked for a further 15-20 minutes until the dumplings have some colour.

I didn’t want to serve the pie in the tin. The first slice never comes out nicely. So I let the pie cool for a short while (can’t remember the exact time….i’d had 2 glasses of the red wine by now!)

And turned it out on to a plate, served with parmesan and olive oil mash potatoes and buttered sprouts.

A fantastic alternative to the traditional Sunday lunch.

Now the tin -

This is the first proper pie I’ve made. So after some internet research and a chat with the lady in Lakeland the best pie tin seems to be the Lakeland perforated tin