Tag Archives: savory

Got Corn?

30 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in Savory Pie

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Here’s a nice little Throwback Thursday post for you. At this time of year, you shouldn’t have a hard time coming across corn (if you do, where are you living?!) I bought it for 30 cents an ear in New Jersey last week, gotta love the Garden State summertime produce. I was also buying boatloads of blueberries…$6 for a 6-package flat? Well, I didn’t want to lose money, and there were pies to be made. But that’s a story for another time.

For now I just wanted to share with you a recipe I’ve been reminiscing about: Ken Haedrich’s Savory Corn Pudding Pie. I do hope you’ve been keeping up with my friend Ken at thepieacademy.com, he’s much better at keeping his blog up-to-date than I and I’m really eager to try some of the new things he’s been posting about, like slab pie.

Without further ado, here’s the link to the Savory Corn Pudding Pie that Ken shared about a year ago. I tried it then, and it’s just about the tastiest thing you can do with an abundance of summer corn. If I had to put my finger on why, I might say the mustard is the trick. I’m a huge sucker for mustard in recipes. But then there’s also the yumminess from the green chilies and the way the cheesy filling gets a little brown on top…*sigh* I guess you’ll just have to try it yourself. Let me know what you think the secret is.

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A Recipe from Nic

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Savory Pie

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Hey Jess,

Loved reading your blog about our trip. So many good memories! Every time I see those photos of us in our maroon tees I’m a little embarrassed I have to admit, but smile and snicker to myself too.
No problem about the recipe. It was one that mum gave me when I got married and is pretty much now a staple in both hers and our house, so I would be happy to share a little of our love! I’ll type it out below…

Hope you guys are well and the Oz plans are coming along nicely. We look forward to seeing you again!

Love love
xx
Country Chicken Pie

Ingredients:
6 thigh fillets (or the equivalent in breast fillets, 2-3 should do)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
250g button mushrooms
25g butter
2 x 35g packets mushroom soup mix
1 1/2 cups milk
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh sage, chopped (thyme also works really well)
Freshly ground black pepper
2 sheets puff pastry (or enough to line your pie pan)
Milk or egg for glazing

Method:
Remove skin from chicken and cut into cubes. Peel onion and chop. Crush, peel and chop garlic. Trim and wash mushrooms. Melt butter in a saucepan and saute chicken, onion, garlic and mushrooms until onion is clear and chicken is cooked through. Mix soup mix and milk together. Pour into saucepan and cook until mixture comes to the boil. Leave until cold then mix in parsley, sage and pepper. Place one sheet of pastry on the bottom of a pie dish. Fill with the chicken and mushroom mixture. Place the second sheet of pastry on top to form a lid for the pie. Brush the edges of the pastry with water and press edges together. Brush milk or egg over the top of the pie for glazing. Make two steam holes in the centre of the pie. Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 25-30 minutes or until golden and cooked.

(For once I guess you’ll have to convert all the measurements into your silly conversions. Yess…about time! Every time I cook a pie from Ken’s book I curse the American measurement system..silly Americans!)

When Friends Come to Visit

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Chocolate Pie, Nut Pie

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It’s really great when friends come to visit. It means that we can do fun things such as: run around San Francisco for a couple of days.IMG_1398IMG_1112

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San Francisco’s a gorgeous city, no doubt, and we loved being there with Nathan and Nic. It’s not like we get to see them often–they live in Australia, after all. We just met Nic last year, when we met up and similarly ran around Salt Lake City (you can read that post, “Guilty Pleasures,” here. You should, it’s a good one.) Nathan we’ve known for quite a while now, and we still like him, so that’s good. People often ask me how come I have so many friends who live all over the world, and it does seem strange at first, I admit. But I know exactly why these friendships work and why they are so good; it has to do with Jesus.

If you ever want to know more, just ask. IMG_1263

Whilst running around San Fran, Nic and I stumbled upon this delight of delights. A chocolate factory! I sagely decided to purchase some chocolate baking discs, as I thought that we would probably be able to make use of them in a pie. (I was right, as you’ll see later on.) Tcho is pronounced with a long O, by the way. For a while I was thinking “Tcha”, like what the first syllable of the word “chocolate” sounds like, but pretty sure that it’s “Tch-oh.” You can read about one of the coolest aspects of the company here. IMG_1122

Nic is quite a cook and baker. A fun fact is that she has also acquired a copy of the Pie cookbook (by way of me and another willing Aussie traveler) and has made a few of the recipes on her own over this past year. This is more of a feat when you take into account the fact that all the recipes are written using American measurements, so I applaud her for her efforts. We were excited to get back home and start pie-ing it up.

One night, Nic showed me how to make a chicken and mushroom pie. I’ve ranted on this before, but, truly, we Americans do not eat enough savory pies. Not even close to enough. Cause they are delicious times a million.

IMG_2675Someday I’m going to try making my own puff pastry. Or maybe that’s a lie. Either way, it didn’t happen on this particular night, but I have no qualms about store-bought puff pastry until they discover a less time-consuming way to make it at home. I think it takes approximately seventeen hours and pounds of butter. Ain’t nobody got time for that.IMG_2678Here’s the finished product, all warm and flaky and lovely. Leave a comment if you’re interested in making a chicken and mushroom pie yourself and I just may be able to share the recipe.
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Now let’s turn our attention to dessert. Remember those Tcho baking discs that came home with me from San Francisco? They made an excellent addition to Macadamia-Chocolate Chunk Pie.

IMG_2705Can anyone tell me why macadamia nuts are so delicious? Is it just all that good fat? The rich, buttery flavor? I have no idea, but there is a lot of attempted self-restraint that goes on when I have an open bag of macadamias around. It’s a massive struggle that looks something like this:

Me: I only need one and a quarter cups of macadamia nuts for that recipe, and I bought two cups. I’ll just have one small handful.

Me: Well, just one more small handful. That’s fine. Then I’ll clip the bag and put it away.

Me: I still have enough left for the recipe, so who really cares? I’m going to take out the bag and have only a couple more. Then that’s IT!

IMG_2707The end result of this pie has a texture that’s sort of half like a nut pie (pecan pie is what I’m sure we’re all the most familiar with), thanks to the egg/corn syrup/brown sugar base. It’s also half cookie-like, with lots of chopped macadamias, chocolate chunks, and coconut flakes. There are a lot of goodies in there. IMG_2719

When friends come to visit, it’s really nice to cook and bake and enjoy each others’ company. And unintentionally wear lots of maroon and take Apple Photo Booth shots of yourselves, as it turns out.

4-up on 2-21-14 at 9.47 PM (compiled)Hopefully it won’t be too long before we are reunited. Australia 2015? Sounds great to me.

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Pertaining to Pasties…

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Chess Pie, Savory Pie

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Our good friend Phil spent a week with us in February. He’s the type of guy who never does anything halfheartedly, whether it’s becoming an overnight fan of the Utah Jazz basketball team or making an authentic Australian meal.

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Once Phil and I had the idea that we must make pasties while he was visiting, the whole thing kind of snowballed.

Oh wait, take a step back. What’s a pasty? Take a second to educate yourself if you’re not sure. (They’re basically meat and vegetable handheld pies.) But if you’re going to make proper pasties, you need to be even more specific.

Things that I discovered while grocery shopping with Phil:

1. Proper pasties contain beef, onion, potato, and swede.

2. Swede is Australian for rutabaga. (!!)

3. In a good and just world, pasties are accompanied by HP Sauce. Not surprisingly, the very American grocery store that we had visited to locate the swede did not stock HP sauce. There was clearly nothing for it but to make our own. Into the cart went the tomatoes.

So there we were, on a Monday night, chopping some steak and swede, mincing fresh rosemary, forming pastry, and simmering homemade HP sauce on the road. I made extra pastry, because savory pie followed by sweet pie is pretty much a perfect meal. As we were making enough food to feed a small army, it was luckily that we had six friends on our way over to share in the goodness.

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(Thanks to Phil for the above photo!)

Here are the recipes we used for the pasties and the sauce. To be fair, we more glanced at the recipe to establish the necessity of including the swede. I used Ken Haedrich’s Basic Flaky Pie Crust for the pastry and we included some herbs in our version, most notably fresh rosemary from a friend’s garden. The sauce was lip-smackingly good; I’d definitely make it again for any and all future steak situations.

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An egg wash over the pasties never hurts. Nor does the accompaniment of a nice Aussie red. I can think of many things that would hurt far more than those.

And now, dessert. A very simple Lemon Chess Pie, which perhaps did not receive a completely thorough cooling before it was consumed, but was none the worse for its lingering warmth and just a tiny bit of runniness.

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PS to Phil/File: Here is a little note I received from a certain young 2nd grader later that week that I thought you might enjoy.

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