Meat & Potato Pie
Recipe Book: Hairy Bikers Complete Mums Know Best Buy the book
Review: DISASTER EPIC READ! I'll give this a 3 Star but it's not a true review to be brutally honest....
The saga: I'd decided to do a bit of a bake fest and started with this pie as the silver surfers were going to be coming over for tea and they do like quite traditional recipes, so I thought this would be a great recipe seeing as it's from a lady not too far away in Ilkley in Yorkshire, just over the border from me. I mean, Yorkshire people make great Pork Pies...what could possibly go wrong? What went wrong was me plus a slight bit of ambiguity in this recipe. NOTE - Dishing up time for this pie is 5PM.
Here it goes....
I get up early on Wednesday morning to get down to the butchers to get my meat and bone ingredients. I get home and read the recipe...Oh no! I was supposed to make the stock for this the day before!! Bloody hell! So what do I do? Yep you guessed it, I think it'll be alright, I've time to try and make it before I start on the actual pie recipe. It's now 7:45am.
I roast the bones for 40 minutes in the roasting oven and then transfer to the pot with the water, shin beef and other ingredients as per recipe and shove it on the floor of the roasting oven for about 2 hours to boil - yes that was boil - to try and save time instead of the 4-5 hours simmering. Why did I do this? Well, because I then read further in the recipe that the pie itself was going to cook for like 3 hours and I was realising that I was rapidly running out of time. I've also realised by this point too that I have absolutely no idea how many people this pie is going to serve as the recipe give no indication.
After 2 hours boiling it's not looking too bad, so I continue with the recipe. I remove the bones from the pot, reduce the liquid by half, skim off the fat...Here comes the recipe ambiguity!!! Liquidise the vegetables.... OKAAAAAAAAY....So does that mean I remove the veg and liquidise them or liquidise them in the pot with the liquid? And then here comes the ultimate question...What do I do with the shin beef??? I read through the recipe again, at no point does this recipe state what the hell I've to do with the bloody shin beef. It's not something I'd like to waste really. Here come the executive decisions...I remove the beef from the pan - not an easy task with a slotted spoon, but I manage it. I then get out the hand blender and start to liquidise the veg in the pan with the remaining liquid...Uh OH...What has happened? My supposed stock now looks like vegetable soup, sort of creamy yellow colour. Not at all what I expected. Maybe, I should have left the beef in....In goes the beef, and another round with the hand blender and I'm left with this awful looking creamy yellowy brown liquid. Truly it looks horrid. I take the plunge and taste it, YUK! This is not nice whatsoever. I'm feeling pretty cross by now as I've wasted hours making this god awful brown sludge. Needless to say it gets chucked, there is no way this shite (it truly is shite) is going in my pie and ruining everything.
Knorr to the rescue.... I make a similar amount of stock using Knorr Rich beef stock pots and continue with the recipe....
Everything else I follow with the recipe and I end up cooking it in my regular oven instead of the Aga as by this point, I don't want anymore disasters.
It turned out OK, me and the husband weren't over keen but the silver surfers loved it. For us the pastry was a bit too thick and stodgy. I decided at dishing up to do as a serves 8 and that seemed adequate. After tea the remaining 4 portions were tubbed up for the silver surfers to take home for their freezer as there was no way I was going to be eating anymore of this and anyway, they loved it.
I've decided that it wasn't this nice lady from Ilkleys fault for the recipe, the responsibility lies with the Hairy Bikers for not being clear in their book, I'm guessing they haven't idiot tested this recipe before printing it. HAHAHA.
Will I make this again? No, never ever again.
#aga #hairybikers