This pie has no pastry base, and a flaky pastry crust. You can make it deep or shallow, depending on how high you want the pastry to filling ratio to be. If you prefer a bottom crust, I would suggest shortcrust, precooked before the filling is added. There is no need for gravy, but go ahead if you like it.
Category: Lunch
Chowder
My own ancestral link to chowder would have to be the hard tack eaten by sailors. These days there seems to be a lot of cream in chowder, but I don't think cream would have survived for long out on the Grand Banks. More likely a mush of hard tack and water. I imagine the cod fisherman eating saltfish chowder on the outbound journey and fresh cod chowder on the return ...
1234 soup
Faced with the ends of a vegetable delivery it can be hard to think of what to make. Here is an easy and flavourful creamy soup which can be eaten as is or used as a base for chowders and pie fillings. Plenty of possible substitutions - just use what you have left over.
Pizza nite! (and calzones too)
Pizza nite was always a happy evening, usually starring mother's pastry pizzas - more to say about them soon. With the weather here generally awful, and a second lockdown in force, sometimes it is hard to be upbeat. But today the sun shone and my neighbour and I had a much needed walk across the …
Basic ravioli and mezzelune
I started making mezzelune when teaching English through cooking. Thought I had invented the name, and then saw some in Tesco's a week later. These are finished in the oven - I think it makes for a more delicate mouthful. It's best to choose only a few ingredients, as on a pizza. But here I am suggesting two different fillings and a sauce. If you think making the ravioli is too fiddly, just roll out the dough in thin rectangles and make lasagne instead.
Brown rice
This was in the 1960s. By the end of the 70s I was living in a legal squat in West Kentish Town and eating rather a lot of brown rice. Not stir fry: a bowl of softened vegetables and rice, available night and day, summer and winter.
A salad of beetroot and Ticklemore, Virginia
Beetroot are sweet and earthy. Once I thought that they were red, but this is not so. They may be pink or creamy, little or big. They absorb flavour and make rich soups and crisp pickles. They are a perfect ingredient in a vegan goulash. But to my way of thinking they are perhaps at their most appealing in a cold weather salad. And to this version, I have added an English goat’s cheese.
Cup a soup
My sister's cooker went off the other day . She went out and for the first time ever bought one of those soup packets that you can rehydrate with boiling water. I waited until I knew she had proper food again before pot roasting a chicken - just couldn't have eaten it eat it knowing she only had a soup packet. But a whole chicken poses problems for someone living alone. After the first night, and sandwiches, what to do? I made soup.
Bean and cheese cannelloni
I first made pasta when teaching English to newly arrived refugees at school. I just couldn't teach grammar all week and I knew they needed to eat. So we had cooking every Friday, and ate it at lunch time. Before the end of the year we compiled the recipes, sold booklets around the school and …
A Cromer crab, Virginia
In summer a brown crab, a Cromer crab, is delicious all by itself. A squeeze of lemon, a turn or two of black pepper, that's all you need. In winter, concentrate on garlicky hot crab with chili and cilantro. Keep a dressed crab in the freezer so that you can fix this in no time, …
Cooking for one 