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Roast vegetable and halloumi tart

Filo tart
Filo tart

I’ve been busy working on some new recipes while having a month off from blogging. This is a really good-looking tart, great for parties. I love working with filo pastry; it’s very forgiving (any little tears can easily be ignored as you layer new sheets on), and the crisp finish is second to none, fantastic against the softened vegetables and the bite of the halloumi.

For one 20cm tart, you’ll need:

50g pancetta
1 large white onion
1 large sweet potato
4 pointed peppers
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
100g halloumi
10 sheets filo pastry
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (390ºF). Toss the pancetta, the onion, diced finely, and the peeled, cubed potato in the olive oil with a large pinch of salt and some pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, stirring once halfway through the cooking time. The sweet potatoes should be turning golden-brown, and  the onions should be sweet and golden. Turn the oven down to 190ºC (370ºF).

While the sweet potato mixture is roasting, cut the peppers in half and grill them, skin side up, until the skins turn black and start to blister. Seal the hot, blistered peppers in a plastic freezer bag. The steam they release will help to loosen the skins and make them easy to slip off with your fingers.

Line a loose-bottomed 20cm tart dish with filo pastry. Lay a sheet halfway across the dish and fold over any that dangles over the edge. Lay another sheet across the other half of the dish, brush them both with butter, and rotate the dish 45 degrees. Repeat the process until you have used up all ten sheets. Prick the base of the pastry a few times with a fork, and line with a circle of greaseproof paper. Fill the tart case with baking beans and bake blind for ten minutes. Remove the beans and paper.

Chop the halloumi into pieces the same size as the chunks of sweet potato, and chop the skinned peppers. Toss the halloumi, peppers and thyme with the sweet potato mixture. Spoon the filling into the tart case. Bake for another 30-40 minutes until golden. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before popping the tart out of the case and serving.

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Peach and mango meringue pie

Peach and mango meringue pie
Peach and mango meringue pie

This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting shortening here, Californians) which is flavoured with lemon zest, and has a juicy filling that’s very easy to put together. I have been obsessing a bit about meringue recently, and the lovely puffy cloud that makes the lid of this pie is a beautiful and really delicious way to top things off.

Michael and Yael are cooking in the US, where weighing scales are not the norm – unfortunately, cup measures aren’t the norm here in the UK, and I have real trouble using them when I’m baking.  As a result, I’ve measured by weight, not volume, below. For those who don’t have a set of scales at home,  there is a decent conversion tool here.

You’ll need an 11 inch (28 cm) flan case with fluted edges and a loose base that you can push out, and some baking beans (some use ceramic beans – I just used half a pack of dried butter beans from the cupboard). If you plan on transporting your pie, you may prefer to use a foil dish.

To make one totally fabulous pie, you’ll need:

Pastry
225g plain flour
25g icing (confectioners) sugar
100g salted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons water (approx – see below)

Filling
4 large, ripe peaches (I used white peaches – choose the most fragrant fruit you can find)
3 ripe mangoes (I used Alphonse mangoes, which are my favourite)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 level tablespoons semolina (cornmeal for Americans)

Meringue
6 egg whites
225g caster sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Peach and mango meringue pieStart by making the pastry. Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl, and rub in the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Try to keep things as cool as possible as you work; your pastry will be crisper and shorter if it stays cold. (My grandmother used to make pastry in a large bowl placed in the kitchen sink while she ran cold water around it – perhaps there’s a degree of overkill in this, but it does work well to help your pastry along in hot weather.)

Use a butter knife to stir the lemon zest, yolk and water into the mixture until you have a stiff pastry. You may need a little more water according to the weather; the behaviour of pastry varies horribly according to how much moisture there is in the air on any given day. Wrap the pastry in cling film (saran wrap for Michael and Yael) and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.

While the pastry is resting, turn the oven to 200ºC (400ºF) and prepare the fruit. Quarter and peel the peaches, then cut each piece into three. Dice the mango in pieces the same size as the peach bits (I’m sure you all know the mango trick, but here’s a YouTube video of someone preparing a mango just in case you’ve not done it before). You can keep the fruit around the stone section to nibble off as a chef’s treat. Cover and set aside.

Roll the pastry out on a cool, lightly floured surface to fit your flan dish. (I have a marble slab for pastry that my Mum bought for me at a gravestone shop. Again, this is probably overkill. It’s also a bit sinister, now I think about it.) Line the dish with the pastry, use a fork to prick the base of the pie case all over, and cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom. Slip the parchment inside the pie and cover it with baking beans. Bake blind – that is to say, without any filling – for 20 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove the beans and parchment and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until the base is dry and golden too. Turn the oven down to 150ºC (300ºF).

Prepare the meringue by whisking the eggs and vinegar for about five minutes until you have stiff peaks (the vinegar will not add a detectable flavour to your pie, but it will make the peaks of the meringue simultaneously crisp and chewy, like a baked marshmallow), adding the sugar a tablespoon at a time as you go. You should end up with a very stiff, glossy mixture.

Sprinkle the semolina into the base of the pie dish – this will soak up excess juices from the fruit. Fill the dish with the fruit mixture (depending on the size of your peaches and mangoes, you may find you have some left over to make a fruit salad with) and sprinkle over the sugar.

Spoon the meringue carefully all over the top of the pie in a dome, making sure there are no gaps, and use a spoon to tease it into lots of peaks on top. Put the pie in the oven at the cooler temperature (don’t worry if the temperature hasn’t quite settled down yet – a little bit of extra heat at the start of cooking won’t hurt it) and bake for 1 hour – 1 hour 10 minutes until the pie is an even gold colour all over and marshmallowy inside. Serve warm or cold, but do make it as close as possible to serving as you can manage to keep the meringue nice and high and puffy.

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Tarte Tatin

Tarte TatinTarte Tatin is one of those lovely recipes with an attached aetiological myth. Back in the 1890s, the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel and restaurant in Loir-et-Cher (still open for business in 2010), had a kitchen accident when making an apple pie. Apples were left cooking an a mixture of sugar and butter for a little too long, and burned. Stéphanie Tatin, who was in charge of the kitchen, tried to save the dish by pressing a disc of pastry onto the ruined apples, and served the finished pie as a sort of upside-down tart. The hotel patrons raved about the resulting dish, a buttery, caramel apple classic was born, and the Tatin family ensured themselves fabulous advertising for their hotel forever.

These days, you can actually buy specialised dishes to cook a Tatin in. I have a Le Creuset Tatin dish which gets used for a lot more than tarts – it’s very dense and distributes the heat gently and evenly, making it great for gratins, shallow pies and other baked dishes. If you don’t have one, a frying pan measuring about 25cm in diameter will do the same job, but it needs to have an ovenproof handle – check before you cook that the length of the handle will allow you to shut the oven door.

You’ll need:

Pastry
170g plain flour
80g caster sugar
140g butter
1 large egg, beaten (I used two bantam eggs, but you’re unlikely to be able to find any if you don’t have a friendly neighbour with bantams, so use a large chicken egg instead)

Apple topping
6 sweet apples (I used Cox’s)
110g caster sugar
110g butter
Zest of 1 lemon

Prepare the pastry first, and let it rest in the fridge while you warm up the oven and prepare the apples.

Sieve the flour into a bowl from a height, and rub the butter in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, and bind with the egg. Depending on the weather, you may also need a little water to bind the pastry. Put the ball of pastry in a freezer bag and refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F.

Core and peel the apples, and cut them into eighths. Melt the butter and sugar together in your Tatin dish or frying pan over a medium heat, and arrange the apple slices neatly over the butter and sugar mixture in the base of the pan. Back on the heat, keep cooking until the butter and sugar begin to caramelise. You’ll see the brown caramel bubbling up through the apple slices. The apple slices must catch and darken, so don’t be shy about taking the pan off the heat – the brown caramel should be visible across the whole dish, which should take 15-20 minutes.

When the apples are ready, roll the pastry out into a disc the same size as your pan. Set it on top of the apples and use your fingers to carefully press the pastry into the dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, then put a plate over the top of the dish and flip it over, using oven gloves to protect your hands. The tart should drop neatly onto the plate. Serve warm, with lashings of cream.

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Ham and pea pie with rough puff pastry

There’s often a home-cooked ham in the fridge here. Always the control freak, I like to be able to season and flavour my own ham for sandwiches, pasta dishes and what have you. A piece of smoked gammon simmered in some aromatics of your choosing for a few hours will always be better (and work out cheaper) than slices from the deli or supermarket, and is very little work – plop it into a pan, bring to a simmer, and leave for a few hours while you try on shoes or whatever else it is you fill your days with.

I’m still a big fan of the Coca Cola stock, beefed up with some aromatics, for hams – it’s really worth a whirl if you’ve not tried it yet. Ginger beer is also alarmingly, counterintuitively good here. If you still can’t stomach the idea, a ham is also delicious poached in water with a slug of wine, a few tablespoons of sugar, some onions, garlic and spices like cloves, fennel, star anise and bay. Experiment, and settle on what you like. In the recipe below, I’m assuming you already have a cooked ham at hand. For this sort of recipe, where rather than slicing the ham you will be shredding or cutting it into chunks, I really like a bacon collar. It’s a less monolithic bit of meat than some of the slicing cuts, and has good marbling which helps push the flavour of the stock deep into the meat.

This recipe is all about the aromatics in the ham and in the bechamel sauce. Infusing the milk for your white sauce with shallot, bay, cloves, parsley, whole peppercorns and a stick of celery raises it from a rather boring binder and filler to something rather delicious and gorgeously scented. If you find this all rather a faff, bechamel freezes very well, so you can save time by making plenty and freezing it in boxes. (You can also freeze the infused milk before turning it into bechamel, bread sauce or other sauces – like the finished bechamel, it holds its flavour very successfully.)

Finally, the pastry. I’ve made a rough puff here to cover the pie (the amount of pastry below makes enough for two pies, and I haven’t halved it because cooking with half an egg isn’t very practical – again, this freezes well, or you can keep the extra pastry in the fridge for up to three days). It’s very easy, deliciously flaky, and melts in the mouth. All the same, I won’t hold it against you if you want to save some time and use some pre-prepared pastry instead.

Filling
1 litre milk
3 bay leaves
2 shallots
3 cloves garlic
12 cloves
1 stick celery
1 small bunch parsley
8 peppercorns
6 tablespoons flour
5 tablespoons salted butter
450g cooked ham (try a bacon collar if you can find one)
120g peas (fresh or frozen, depending on the time of year)

Crust
450g flour
120g butter
240g lard
1 egg, and 1 yolk to glaze
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
170ml water

Start by infusing the milk. Peel and halve the shallots, and stud them with the cloves. Put all the aromatics in a thick-bottomed pan with the milk, and bring very slowly to a simmer. Turn the heat off, put the lid on and leave to infuse in a warm place for three hours.

While the milk is infusing, put the pastry together. Beat the egg into a bowl with the sugar, lemon juice and water. Beat the mixture and chill in the fridge. Use your fingers to rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs, and chop the lard (also straight from the fridge) into pieces about the size of the top joint of your little finger. Stir it into the flour/butter mixture. Add the egg mixture bit by bit, stirring the mixture with a knife until everything comes together. Put the pastry into a freezer bag and rest it the fridge for at least half an hour, until you are ready to put the pie together.

Strain the solid ingredients out of the milk and discard them. Make the bechamel sauce by melting the butter and flour together over a low heat in a clean pan, and cook, stirring, for five minutes. Add the milk a small amount at a time, stirring sauce constantly as you go. The sauce will thicken as you work. Keep adding milk bit by bit until it is all incorporated, and the sauce is thickened. Don’t add salt to the sauce; there should be enough in the ham to season the whole dish.

When you are ready to put the pie together, preheat the oven to 230°C (445°F).

To assemble the pie, chop the ham into bite-sized pieces. Put a layer of ham in the bottom of a pie dish, cover with a layer of peas, and repeat until you have used all the ham and peas up. Pour over the bechamel sauce until your pie dish is filled. Depending on the size of your dish, you may have some left over, but I’m sure you’ll find something to do with it.

Cut the ball of pastry in half and put the half you’re not using in the fridge or freezer.

Roll the pastry you are using out in a large rectangle, and fold it into three, as if it was a piece of A4 paper you are going to put into an envelope. Give the pastry rectangle a quarter turn, roll it out into a large piece again, fold into three, roll out and repeat four or five times. You’ll end up with a sheet of pastry about half a centimetre thick made up of many layers. Lay the pastry sheet on top of the pie dish, cut the excess off the edges and pinch the pastry into place on the dish. Cut a large cross in the middle to allow steam to escape and brush with a beaten egg yolk.

Bake at 230°C (445°F) for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 200°C (390°F). Cook for 25 minutes, until the pastry is golden and the pie steaming. Serve immediately.

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Cottage pie

It’s that stodge-craving time of year, and very few things fit the bill better than a handsome cottage pie. This one has an intense and rich filling, and it’s blanketed with a generous layer of lovely, fattening mash. (In less apocalyptic weather, I’d use a bit less topping, but right at the moment I am mindfully using mashed potato as internal insulation from the biting cold.)

I’ve used veal mince here, from non-crated calves. It has a lighter flavour than beef, and it’s less fatty, but you can substitute beef mince if you prefer it. The root vegetables add sweetness and earthy depth – this is a wonderfully wintery pie. To serve four, you’ll need:

Filling
450g veal mince
1 large onion
1 large carrot
1 large parsnip
1 tablespoon smoked paprika (use unsmoked paprika if you can’t find any)
2 bay leaves
1 thyme leaves, stripped from stalks
100ml vermouth
2 tablespoons tomato purée
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
200ml good beef stock
2-3 tablespoons olive oil

Mash
800g floury potatoes (I used King Edwards)
150ml whole milk
1 large knob butter
Generous grating of nutmeg

Chop the onion, carrot and parsnip into small dice. Take a large, heavy-based pan, and sweat them over a low heat in the olive oil until soft; the onions should be starting to take on some colour. Add the paprika, bay and thyme, and keep cooking, stirring all the time, for two minutes. Tip the meat into the pan and turn the heat up to medium. Stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan all the time, cook until the meat is browning nicely.

Pour the vermouth into the pan and let it bubble up. Add the Worcestershire sauce and tomato puree, then stir in the stock and a large pinch of salt (use all the fingers of your hand to pinch, not just finger and thumb). Bring the mixture up to a simmer and turn the heat down low again. Continue to simmer with the lid on for an hour, then remove the lid and continue to simmer for 20 minutes. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

At this point, you can put the pie filling in the fridge overnight if you have time. As with so many casseroled and simmered dishes, the flavour improves if allowed to settle and develop for 24 hours.

When you are ready to make up the pie, peel the potatoes and cook them as you usually would for mash. When mashing, add the butter, the milk and the nutmeg with a generous amount of salt. Put the filling in a pie dish and spread the mash on top. I like it spread in a sort of thatched roof arrangement, which is pure posing, but does look good. Make sure you mark your topping with a fork – this will ensure you get some nice crispy bits when the pie is cooked.

Bake at 180°C (350°F) for 30 minutes or until golden brown on top.

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Fisherman’s pie

They tell me it’s brain food. I remain unconvinced – I am absolutely no better at doing sums than I was before I cooked this, but I am deliciously full and thinking hard about marine biology.

This is a lovely take on fisherman’s pie, a thousand miles away from any variant you may have eaten in the school dining hall. Some of the fish is fresh, some smoked, and this gives it a deep, warm background without overdoing the smoky flavour. Sweet peas and prawns are balanced by a hit of lemon juice and nutmeg, and creamy mash makes a golden lid for the whole thing.

Although this is a fish dish, you’ll find it keeps well overnight in the fridge. This amount made two filling suppers for two greedy people with a sharply dressed green salad. I used frozen haddock fillets here, but you can use any firm, flaky white fish, frozen or fresh.

To serve four, you’ll need:

500g haddock fillets
200g smoked haddock
100g smoked salmon
100g peeled prawns, raw if possible
150g butter
50g plain flour
570ml milk
50g frozen peas
2 eggs
2 teaspoons capers in white wine vinegar
Juice of ½ lemon
A few gratings of nutmeg
1kg potatoes (choose a floury variety like King Edward)
3 tablespoons double cream
Cheddar cheese to sprinkle

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

Lay the haddock (defrosted if frozen) and smoked haddock in the baking dish you plan to make the pie in – it should have a capacity of between 1.5 and 2 litres. Pour over half the milk and dot with 25g of butter. Season with plenty of pepper and bake for 20 minutes. Pour the liquid from the baking dish into a measuring jug, top up with the remaining milk and reserve. Remove any skin or bones from the cooked fish and flake it into large pieces in the baking dish.

Hard-boil the eggs, and quarter them. Combine them in the baking dish with the flaked fish, drained capers, the frozen peas, the prawns (raw or cooked, but defrosted if frozen) and the smoked salmon. (I used Waitrose’s flakes of hot-smoked salmon – if you can’t find hot-smoked salmon use the regular variety and use scissors to cut it into bite-sized pieces.)

Peel the potatoes and set them to boil as usual for the mashed potato topping. While the potatoes are boiling, melt 75g of the butter in a saucepan. Stir in the flour and cook over a medium-low flame, stirring, for four minutes. Add the milk and fish cooking liquid a little at a time, stirring well after every addition until the sauce thickens. Continue until all the milk mixture is incorporated, and bring to a low simmer until the sauce thickens again. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and stir in the lemon juice and a grating of nutmeg. Pour the sauce over the ingredients in the baking dish.

Mash the potatoes well with the cream, 50g of the butter, another generous grating of nutmeg and plenty of salt and pepper. Spread or pipe the potatoes over the ingredients in the baking dish, and sprinkle with Cheddar cheese.

Bake for 40 minutes, until the cheesy top is a golden brown.

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Steak and wild mushroom pie

pieAstute readers will notice that recently I’ve been obsessing somewhat about puff pastry. This should be your last puff pastry recipe for a bit – use a roll from the supermarket chiller cabinet or make your own using the recipe for curry puffs.

Dried wild mushrooms are great. A small handful, especially when simmered for a long time with the meat as in this dish, will infuse the whole pie with a wonderful rich, earthy fragrance. I’ve also used some fresh mushrooms here to bulk out the pie and to add some texture. Try different kinds of mushroom when you make this – my dried mushrooms were cepes, summer boletes and girolles, while I chose lovely firm little Crimini mushrooms (a bit like button mushrooms, but a darker chestnut colour) to add at the end.

pie crustA note on the pastry decoration – a pastry rose on top of a pie is, in Lincolnshire, where my Great Grandma lived, a visual cue to remind you in the larder that it’s a meat pie, and not a fruit pie. Just make a small pastry spiral for the centre and glue on some petals around the outside with some beaten egg.

To serve two (heartily) you’ll need:

1 lb stewing steak, diced
8 shallots, quartered
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon flour
1 small handful dried mushrooms
1 punnet fresh mushrooms
Juice of ½ a lemon
1 wine glass vermouth
½ pint good stock
Salt and pepper
Olive oil and butter to fry
Puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

Set the dried mushrooms to soak in ½ a pint of freshly boiled water.

Brown the steak in batches in the olive oil, and remove to a plate. Set aside. Sauté the shallots in the same oil with two cloves of sliced garlic until they are soft, with brown edges. Return the meat to the pan with a tablespoon of flour and stir well. Add the mushrooms and their soaking liquid. Pour over the vermouth and the stock, and simmer with no lid on a low heat for an hour or so, until the sauce is thick and reduced.

Sauté the chopped fresh mushrooms in butter with another clove of garlic in a separate pan. When they give up their juices, add the lemon juice, and continue to cook until nearly all the liquid is gone. Stir into the reduced meat and mushroom pan, and season the whole mixture to taste.

Transfer the mixture to a pie dish and top with pastry. Cut a hole in the centre to allow the steam to escape, and decorate with a rose, glazing with the beaten egg. Bake the pie at 200° C for 25 minutes, until brown and glossy.

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Banoffee pie – homemade dulce de leche

Banoffee pie is one of the easiest desserts to make – there’s no real cooking involved, just some butter-melting, some biscuit-smashing, some pre-emptive tin-boiling, some cream-pouring and some banana-slicing. Easy as . . . pie.

No cream in these photographs; I didn’t get that far before the pie was crumbled into bits by enthusiastic lunch guests. (I prefer my banoffee pie with pouring cream, although you’ll read many recipes which call for whipped cream. Follow your own preference.)

The gloriously gloopy toffee stuff in a banoffee pie is dulce de leche, an Argentinian caramelised milk sauce. You can buy it in jars from Merchant Gourmet in most supermarkets, but it’s very easy to make at home. Just cover an unopened tin of condensed (not evaporated) milk with water in a saucepan and boil for an hour and a half, making sure that the water stays topped up. The can won’t come under enough pressure to go pop. When your dulce de leche is finished, it will keep indefinitely in the can; I like to make several cans full at a time and keep some in the cupboard for my emergency pie needs. Use a permanent marker to identify your boiled tins – the paper will have come off them.

Banoffee pie uses a cheesecake base, which is easy to prepare and freezes well. If you make some spares and freeze them, you’ll have a near-instant dessert for the next time you have visitors.

For one pie, you’ll need:

20 digestive biscuits
3 rounded tablespoons butter
1 tin dulce de leche (see above)
5 bananas
Cream for pouring

Line a springform cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Crush the biscuits into crumbs. This takes a few seconds in the food processor, but if you don’t have one you can put them in a sealed plastic sandwich bag and wallop the bejesus out of them with a rolling pin. Melt the butter and combine with the crumbs until you have a stiff paste. Mould the paste in the bottom of the tin until you have a flan base with shallow sides. Don’t worry about being too tidy; you’ll be covering the base up in a while.Put the cake tin in the fridge for about an hour to harden.

When the pie crust is nice and solid, remove it from the cake tin and spread a whole tin of cooled dulce de leche on the base. Top this with chopped, fresh bananas. Pour over gouts of cream and serve.