Pot luck cooking

I had a pot luck dinner/bridge party to go to last night. I usually make a dessert, but chicken thighs were on special at the supermarket last week, so I decided to make a "Greek style" creamy chicken pie from this book. The Australian Woman's Weekly puts out quite good cookbooks - not haute cuisine, but tasty and reliable recipes.

I used to make this pie quite often a few years ago, when you could get tough old retired laying chooks for a couple of dollars. The recipe calls for cooked chicken, so it really doesn't matter if you've boiled a tough old thing for a few hours or poached some juicy tender boneless thighs for a few minutes as I did here:


The cup or so of stock that was produced in the poaching process has been further reduced and frozen for a rainy day.

The other main flavours in the pie are onions (supposed to be shallots, but I rarely have any), bacon, and garlic …


… which you fry gently in butter.


This particular butter is some I made myself last Friday. My sister-in-law was making her own butter a while ago, when dairy prices were so high. She reckoned it was cheaper than buying it; I got 430 g (~1lb) of butter from 1 litre (~1 1/2 pints) of cream, which cost over $5. Butter is anywhere from $3 - $4.50 ish for 500 g so I don't see where the economy comes in, but it is very nice butter. Not that bought butter isn't nice, it mostly is - there are some shops I won't buy it from though, they don't look after it properly and it gets nasty flavours from being under lights.

Anyway, you fry the bacon etc for quite a while. It starts off with the butter and the juices emulsifying, you need to cook it for long enough that the fat separates out again …


… so you can use it to make a roux. You end up with a thick flavoursome sauce …


… to which you add the chopped up chicken …


… some grated cheese, and some eggs.


I get my eggs from my friend Sue's hens. Look at how yellow the yolks are - they make the whole pie filling a lovely golden colour:


The filling goes ito a dish lined with filo pastry:




You fold the hanging edges of pastry over the top, then place another couple of sheets of pastry on top. All brushed with melted butter of course.


I had too much filling, and a lot of filo pastry, so I made half a dozen little triangle things for my week's lunches. You can see the process in this collage:


I was lazy and got Picasa to make the collage for me so it's not in quite the right order. The correct order is, from top left, across, down, across, down diagonally, across - ending at the bottom left. The single sheet of filo is buttered on the top 2/3, then folded in thirds longwise.

Here they are going into the oven:


And here they are coming out:


I cooked the big pie a little less - it was going to have to go in the oven at Alec's house to warm up, so I could finish browning it there.


I also made some loaves of bread to take:


I'm really getting the hang of bread.

I had one loaf myself. Here is some of it spread with my beautiful butter and cape-gooseberry jam.


Yum. Cape-gooseberry jam is my favourite jam of all time. My great uncle used to grow them and my aunt used to make jam from them. When he died (a long long time ago) I had to start growing them myself, which is not so easy this far south. Fresh bread from the hot bread shop with cape-gooseberry jam piled on top (my aunt had a sweet tooth, and was generous with the jam) and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast, in bed no less, is one of my best childhood memories of holidays at Auntie H's house.

Creamy Chicken Pie (Kotopita)
from Easy Greek Style Cookery

Ingredients
60g butter
4 bacon rashers, sliced (I used bacon ends, they're cheaper)
6 green shallots (I used 2 onions)
2 cloves garlic, crushed (mine was elephant garlic and I chopped it)
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 1/2 cups milk
3 1/2 cups chopped cooked chicken
1/3 cup grated parmesan (I used tasty cheddar, and quite a lot more than 1/3 cup)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
10 sheets filo pastry
80g melted butter, for brushing the pastry.

Method
Lightly grease a 23cm round pie dish (I used an oblong one).
Heat butter in pan, fry bacon, garlic, and shallots, stirring, until bacon is crisp. Take off heat.
Add flour, stir until combined with the fat. Gradually stir in the milk and cook, stirring, until mixture has thickened and boiled.
Cool.
Stir in chicken, cheese, and eggs. (I taste it here to see if it needs salt)
Layer two sheets of pastry together, brushing each with butter. Fold layered sheets in half lengthwise, place in prepared dish with edges overhanging.
Repeat with another 6 sheets and more butter, overlapping strips clockwise around dish until covered. (I put one lot lengthwise in my oblong dish, and two lots crosswise)
Spoon chicken mixture into pie, fold overhanging edges back onto top of filling. Brush all over with more butter.
Layer reamining two pastry sheets with butter, fold in half crosswise with buttered sides together. Place pastry on top of pie, trim edge. (I don't need to trim, the pastry fits my dish perfectly)
Brush top with melted butter, bake in moderate oven (180˚C or 350˚F) about 35 minutes, or until browned and heated through. Cover with foil if pie begins to over-brown.

Note:
The exact amounts of pie filling ingredients don't much matter. I make it with whatever chicken, bacon etc. I have and adjust sauce amounts accordingly. The sauce wants to be quite thick before you add the chicken, cheese, and egg - it thins down a fair bit when you add the eggs, and then sets firm when it's cooked. In yesterdays pie I had a good deal more than 3 1/2 cups chopped chicken, so I made a bit more sauce than the recipe said, and added 3 eggs.

Salad and Cheese and Shoes (especially for Emily)

The weather is so nice I've been bringing salads to work for lunch all this week. They're all fairly similar; lots of lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, cherry tomatoes, spring onions, an egg, and some meaty thing, all with bought low fat dressing.

Today's egg is a miso egg, and the meat is Korean Beef from the freezer. Other days I've had salmon and roast pork and various curry eggs.


The curry eggs are made the same way as miso eggs are, except I use curry paste or curry powder mixed to a paste with oil and salt. The salt and flavour seem to migrate through the white to the yolks and make them very delicious - as well as colouring the whites. I bring the eggs to work still wrapped in their gladwrap and paste, and wash them just before I eat them.

I also brought one of my white mould-ripened Neufchâtel cheeses to work today for people to try. Here is some spread on crackers:


You can see that some of it is very gooey and ripe. The centres are less so, but it doesn't really matter with this cheese - it's not as chalky as camembert.

OK Emily, here are some shoes:


I bought these ones in London in 2005, and haven't worn them until today. They have another set of laces, in the natural rope colour so you can vary their look a little. I had a bit of a mission finding something to wear with them, and I'm going to have trouble with many of my other unworn shoes too I think. I'm going to need to buy some fabric and make a couple of things in cream. Not this week though.

We have Spring.

The willows, which were brown sticks last week, are all green and fresh looking:


The blossom is just gorgeous by the Registry building (the original University of New Zealand) …


… and on the baby trees by the sculptures outside our newest lecture theatre building …

… which contains a café as well as the monster lecture theatre and some small seminar rooms:


I have no idea what this plant is - I was going to say flower, but I don't think it is a flower, I think it's one of those bract things - it's very eye-catching in the Botanical Gardens:


The camelias are out in force - I'm going to have to go for a walk through the rhododendron dell soon, it's coming up for that time.


This is the fancy sculpture at the main entrance to the Gardens:


It has cultural significance. Don't ask me what, but it has it.

Bee crap

My car is covered in it. I don't know what I thought bees did with their bodily wastes, but I never thought of them crapping everywhere.


I have these little yellow blobs all over my car.

This is because my car park is directly under this window:


Those little tubes are bee doors. A guy in our department does experiments involving bees, and has just moved them into new lab space behind the window. They had to put in the bee doors because bees are fussy and like to go outside to relieve themselves.

All over my car.

Stilton & Ricotta Salata

This week I'm making Stilton - or as close to it as I can get. You start with full cream milk, and add more cream before adding mesophilic starter and some P. roqueforti. After the milk has ripened you add a fairly small amount of rennet and let it set for quite a long time - 90 minutes the book said, but I left mine a little longer. You then, instead of cutting the curds, spoon it out of the pot and into a cloth-lined colander, where you let it sit in its whey for another hour and a half.

After that you gather the corners of cloth and hang it up to drip, and when it stops you wrap it up and stick some weights on top of it to squeeze out more whey overnight.


This is all actually very similar to the Neufchâtel, except for the P. roqueforti. You use a bit more rennet so the curd does actually set, but apart from that it's pretty much the same.

But because you have used more rennet and have a more solid curd, the next steps are different. You break up the lump of curd into ~ 1 inch pieces and mix them with salt, then put the curds into a mould sandwich (board, sushi mat, mould with curds, sushi mat, board) which gets flipped every 15 mins or so for a couple of hours before you leave it to set.

My curds wouldn't all fit into my biggest mould, so the leftovers went into a smaller hoop. I'm going to experiment with them, and coat them in P. candidum in a few days, and see what sort of blue/white cheese I end up with.

I'm trying to make ricotta salata with this week's whey. I have no idea what I'm doing really - I looked around on the net and found a few descriptions of the stuff (it's a cheese I've never seen, much less tasted), and this person's instructions, which he made up himself as well.

I moulded my salted ricotta in this heart mould for 3 hours …


… before tipping it out and salting the outside. I'm not wrapping it in gladwrap, I think I'll just leave it draining on the sushi mat and applying salt regularly.


We'll see what happens.

Very elegant new tights

Here are two views of me dressed up to go to Jo's party last night.


I finally had an excuse to wear those very elegant seamed tights. I bought them on the internet from England last year some time. I'm also wearing a new pair of very cheap black satin hidden platform pumps, and trying to do the whole Dita von Teese thing with my low-backed rose-y dress and little cropped red jacket. Not to mention make-up. I hardly ever wear any other than lipstick these days; it takes forever to put on because I can't see without my glasses, and it's very difficult to apply with glasses. This lot took about half an hour to do, and I still wasn't sure it was smooth and even. I ended up un-curling my hair after I took this photo too; I couldn't get it to look sufficiently 1950s-ish with the curling irons. It would only look middle-aged.