Mid-week blues? Eat a piece of pie..

As if a 5 day week isn’t long enough.

Coming Saturday is a working day. A Saturday. Work on a Saturday. Office on a Saturday.

I almost wept with grief when I got the email. My weekend siesta, weekend drive, weekend ‘date’ with M…

Oh well.

After a totally crazy day at work, after re-doing the project plan umpteen number of times (I even missed my lunch!), I wanted to unwind. Sometimes, M and I go out to this neighborhood supermarket pretty late in the evening. I espcially like this one because it has a counter where they sell freshly baked stuff – I am talking chicken puff, lovely breads, hot oven fresh cakes, muffins. You can smell all that food from about a mile away. Makes the tummy go ‘gro-w-w-l’. And I really love their chicken pie – its peppery, onion-y, buttery – and the sole reason I forced M to drive me there was for a bite of this warm meat stuffed pastry.

Well, mid week blues wasn’t about to leave me alone as yet.

No pie. All sold out. Blue-washed again.

So we came back home and I still wanted a pie. Off to the kitchen I went, and, hold your breath, actually made one. My first pie ever. All peppery buttery and onion-y… Just the way I wanted it.

Mid week blues no more.

My Very First Savory Chicken Pie:

Ingredients

For the pastry -

• 400 grams of plain flour
• 250 grams butter or margarine
• Pinch of baking powder – about 1/2 teaspoon
• Salt to taste
• Cold water to mix

For the filling -

• 400 grams chicken – I used boiled and shredded breast pieces
• 1/4 cup of boiled peas
• 1/2 cup chopped onions
• 1 tablespoon oil to saute
• 3-4 tablespoons of cream. If you do not want to use cream, use equal amount of thick chicken soup
• Pepper and salt to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

Procedure

1. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, baking powder together.
2. Now, add the butter to this mixture and rub everything between your fingers to mix lightly.
3. Now add a little cold water at a time to form a nice soft dough. Knead this dough lightly and leave to rest in the refrigerator for a few minutes.
4. In the meantime, heat the oil in pan and fry the onions. When they turn golden, add the shredded chicken and peas and fry for a few minutes.
5. Now add the pepper, salt, cinnamon and cumin. Mix and fry for some a couple of minutes more.
6. Now add the cream or soup and let it all simmer for a little while. Don’t let this dry out – you want it to be juicy and creamy. Once it is done, set it aside to cool.
7. Now, roll out a bit more than half of the dough into a round-ish shape. Don’t thin out the dough too much. Place this into the bottom and overlapping the sides of a 20-cm greased round pie dish.
8. Place the cooled-chicken mixture into this crust.
9. Roll out the remaining dough into a 20-cm round circle to cover the top of the pie and place it over the top of the chicken mixture. Trim the extra edges of the pastry, then pinch the sides of the bottom crust and the top-cover-crust together to seal it up.
10. With a fork, gently poke the covering of the pie to create small pores for ventilation.
11. Bake in preheated oven at 180 degrees centigrade for 20 to 30 minutes or until pastry is done.
12. Remove from oven and cool a bit before serving.

Here’s how it looked like after it was cooled:

Notice the little holes on top. Cute!

This is M’s piece of the savory pie. One solitary pea..

It was a good pie…

I ate almost all of it.

Well, M ate a bit too.

But, this was my share…

**Grin**