Spicy chicken & bacon pasties .. or tarts, in this case.

Why "tarts", you may ask?

Well, it's because the art of pleating a pasty completely deserted me.  Four times over.

Exhibit A

Normally, I'm pretty good at pleating a pasty - although I usually do sideways pleats, as opposed to "straight across the top" pleats.  I think, next time I make these pasties - and there will be a next time - I'll stick to what I know and go for sideways pleating.  Oh, and I might very well remember to cut my fingernails next time too.  How anyone with long fingernails ever gets pastry to stay together without their fingernails cutting half moon shapes into the pastry, is beyond me.  I certainly can't!

As a consequence, my pasties burst asunder in the oven and turned themselves into boat-shaped tarts.  See Exhibit A, alongside.  Fortunately, it didn't matter overly much (perhaps a little dry in places) as the contents began life fairly moist and the risen edges of the pasties obviously protected the contents from over cooking.

The original recipe (which you can see here) called for a ready cooked chicken breast, but I didn't have one of those.  I did, however, have a raw chicken breast so I pan-fried it and left it to cool before doing anything else.  Personally, I think that this approach saved the chicken component from being over dry, as I stopped cooking the chicken just slightly before I would ordinarily have done.  This left the meat still slightly pink, which was obviously cooked out by the baking that the pastry received.  Ingenious, eh?

Well they didn't look too bad ...

In addition, I also tinkered about with the original recipe in that instead of using three spring onions, I used half a sliced leek and one small shallot.  I suspect that doing this gave a lot more moistness to the mixture (from the leek) and boosted the gentle onion flavour (care of the shallot).  Sometimes I find spring onions to be a bit harsh.

I also put way more bacon in than the recipe said.  After all, two rashers of streaky bacon rather depends on how big your rashers are, doesn't it.  Mine were teensy wee little things (supermarket bacon, in this instance), so I wound up using half a pack.

As a consequence, I suspect I had rather more "middle" to my pasties than was originally intended.  However, I reckon that the next time I make them, I can easily make five out of the same ingredients, so that's the way to go.

I served ours, as you can see, with a salad.  I'm not entirely convinced that a salad was the right thing for them, as they seemed to need something more robust.  I might try them, next time, with baked beans and something like Nigella's Rapid Roastini's or maybe hash browns or sweet potato wedges.  They do need something juicy (which the baked beans would provide), but because of the complex nature of their contents, need something fairly bland beside that.

So that's a work in progress - and if you try this recipe, perhaps you could report back on what you served them with and how well you feel they went together.  I'd be interested to know, as this is definitely one of those recipes that doesn't suit what immediately comes to mind!

As for the flavours, well they're very acceptable indeed.  Hubby wasn't too keen on his to begin with, but the flavour develops as you eat your way through the pasty and, by the end, he was ready to demolish the leftover one.  Now, if I tell you that he didn't get to eat it all on his own, but son & heir had the other half, that will indicate just how nice these are.  I suspect they'd be perfect picnic food and will behave in exactly the same way that a Cornish Pasty does - except with more chilli!

SPICY CHICKEN & BACON PASTIES  (serves 4, with one each)

Ingredients :

1 skinless & boneless chicken breast

1 tbsp olive oil

125g streaky bacon, chopped

1 large potato (about 250g total weight), peeled and sliced on the mandolin

1 small red chilli, deseeded if necessary and finely chopped

a small, or half a, leek - sliced

a small shallot, sliced

sea salt & freshly ground black pepper

375g pack ready-rolled puff pastry

2 tbsp milk or 1 beaten egg.

Method :

1.  Heat oven to 200deg C (fan).

2.  Place the chicken breast in between two pieces of cling film and bash it with something heavy (a rolling pin, for ease!) until it is thin and flat.

3.  Take a large frying pan, add the olive oil and fry the chicken breast, seasoning each side as you go.  Remove from the pan when there is still a little pinkness left in the middle of the meat.  Set aside to cool.

4.  Fry the bacon over a medium heat until it starts to release its fat.

3.  Add the potato, turn up the heat and fry, stirring occasionally, until the bacon is crisp and the potato just underdone.

4.  Add the chilli, leeks and shallot and cook and stir until the leeks are softened and the shallot transparent.

5.  Season with pepper and add a pinch of salt, then set aside to cool.

6.  Take the chicken and shred it into long thin strips.  Once the bacon mixture is cool, add to the chicken and stir to combine.

7.  Roll out the pastry until you can cut 5 tea plate size rounds from it.

8.  Lift circles onto a baking tray.

9.  Spoon the filling into the middle of each circle.  Brush the edges of the pastry with the milk or egg, then bring the sides up to the middle (or one side to the other, if you prefer your pasties laid on their sides), pinching the pastry together to make a pasty.

10.  Brush with a little more milk or egg and bake for 15 minutes until golden.

Serve.

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Two days into the new week : meal planning w/b 11.10.11

Yes, I know, I should have done this blog post by now.  Oh, but you do nag!  *chuckle*

Don't ask me what I've been doing in the meantime, but I seem to have been sat at the computer without anything useful coming of it, except I have collected quite a few new recipes and ideas for menu planning in future.  I consider this to be a good thing.

This week's meal plan is quite a good'un, I reckon.  It seems to be dominated by bacon in several instances, but three out of seven isn't all bad.

So let's have a look at what I'm planning :

Tues : Pizza for son & heir, Sweet & Sour Pork with rice for us

Wed : Spicy Chicken & Bacon pasties with salad

Thurs : Meatballs and pasta

Fri : Chicken Piccata with mashed potatoes, carrots & broccoli

Sat : Pasta Alla Amatriciana

Sun : Lamb & boulangere potatoes with carrots & garden veg

Mon : Full English Breakfast.

That all sounds really nice, I reckon.  I'm looking forward to all of it!

It's now Thursday as I'm writing this, so we've already had the Sweet & Sour Pork and my goodness what a triumph it was!  Accolades have to be given to the Adora's Box blog which is where the recipe came from.  The next time I make it (and there will be a next time) I shall make sure to include son & heir in, as I'm sure he'd enjoy it.  The flavours are gentle and rounded, not at all rough or acidic as they so often are with sweet and sour recipes.  He particularly hates vinegar-like flavours, and although this recipe contains a tablespoonful of vinegar, you'd be hard pressed to know.

Anyway, it deserves a blog post of its own, so watch out for it!

Last night was the Spicy Chicken & Bacon Pasties and apart from a complete lack of being able to pleat a pasty - my skill at doing so totally deserted me - they were really successful.  This one came from a BBC Good Food "40 Chicken recipes" booklet and you can find the recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

I will be blogging about these separately, too - and will include my recipe for them, as I tinkered about with it quite a lot!

Tonight was to have been Meatballs & Pasta, produced by hubby, but we had one of those "forgetting to take it out of the freezer" moments and so the meatballs are off.  We'll have to stop at Sainsbury's and pick up a bag of salad and some fish in breadcrumbs, I reckon.

Apparently, this is what it will look like!

Tomorrow's recipe, Chicken Piccata, is one from Foodista.  However, the author is anonymous, so I can't give him or her the credit they deserve.  Anyway, it's an interesting recipe where you pan fry the flattened out chicken breasts that have been dunked in seasoned flour with lemon zest.  Then you make a sauce which involves wine, lemon juice and capers.  I'm hugely interested to know how this will turn out, so watch the blog and I'll tell you!

Saturday's Pasta Alla Amatriciana is a bit of an experiment.  I used to have an Amatriciana recipe that son & heir and I really liked, but that didn't agree with hubby and gave him terrible indigestion.  I eventually had to bin that recipe, having tried all ways to make it okay for him to eat, without success.

This one, however, is prepared completely differently and with different ingredients (in some instances) and with no chilli.  Again, I'm intrigued by it.  It comes from Chow.com and is attributed to a Chef called Robert Sietsema.  For all that I can't replicate a lot of his ingredients as they are die-hard Italian, I'll do my best to get good ingredients locally for this and we'll see how I fare!

Sunday sees a repetition of the Lamb & boulangere potatoes that got bounced from last week.  I'm determined to do this recipe as it keeps on making my mouth water!  I'm hoping that some more of the garden vegetables will be ready to use by then.  In fact, looking down the garden from the window here, I can see a Romanescu Cauliflower peeking out the top of some leaves - so we should be okay there!

Now I do think that perhaps we should skip lightly over Monday and not talk about it too much.  *blush*  Why am I so embarrassed?  Well, it's a full English Breakfast for dinner - and I'm supposed to be losing weight!  However, it's a request from son & heir who doesn't often request particular meals - and we'd all been feeling the lack of black pudding in our diets, for ages.  A large part of the meat (bacon & sausage) will be grilled and if I don't have any fried bread and opt for a poached egg instead of fried, I reckon I should be able to get by without doing too much damage!  Ah well, it only happens once in a blue moon.

I also have a conundrum to conjur with, this week.  I have been given a huge bag of apples, which are demanding to be done something creative with.  Having had a long and intense ponder, I'm currently thinking along the lines of an apple cake.  Not so much sponge, as a more robust mix such as the Marmalade cake used.  Also, not sliced apples laid on the top, more chunks of apple throughout the cake - much as you would find cherries in a cherry cake.  Maybe some caramel aspect in there too.  I dunno - I'm still working it out.  However, rest assured that you'll hear about it quick sharp if it works out well - and with rather less speed if it's a complete disaster.

So - lots to look forward to!

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