the week's cooking and baking

Yesterday I made a raised pork pie using the Paul Hollywood recipe linked to. I tweaked it a little bit out of necessity and laziness, using bratwurst because English sausages aren't available where I live, and some chopped up ham steak because I couldn't be bothered with cooking a ham hock (also, US ham hocks are very very smoky, and I wasn't sure if that would be right). I used regular shallots because I've never even seen a banana shallot.

Anyway, unlike the beef pie I tried last time, I like this one a lot. The meat isn't all soft and gooshy and the overall texture is drier, so the pastry stayed more crisp.

I've been having one problem with hot water crust pastry, though, which is that when I cut into a pie, the pastry tends to break off in chunks instead of slicing neatly. Anybody have any advice on this? I'm not sure if it's just a case of "your pie will not look like the perfect photo in the cookbook" or if I'm doing the pastry wrong, perhaps making it too dry.


In other baking, yesterday I mixed up a batch of dough for what The Book of Buns calls Snittsidan Bullar, a Swedish bread roll topped with seeds. The book calls for white and/or whole wheat bread flour and a little rye; I ended up using white and whole wheat flour in equal proportions, plus some barley flour and the rye. I acquired the barley flour a while back because it was on clearance for cheap, so hopefully it works well in this recipe. The dough is on the counter now to warm up and rise after an overnight refrigeration, and I'm going to top the rolls with a mix of pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

( cooking under the cut )

post-Christmas salad

Some googling around while I was trying to decide exactly what shape my grain-salad plans should take reminded me that olives + oranges are said to be a good combination, and that I had both in my refrigerator.

Here's what ultimately ended up in the salad, which is delish or I wouldn't bore you with a second cooking post in one day.

About 1 c dry freekeh, cooked in water until tender but chewy
1 c dry kasha, toasted in olive oil along with a thinly sliced shallot and then cooked in water until tender but chewy
Big handful of green olives stuffed with feta cheese, sliced
Big handful of picholine olives, whole
2 oranges (1 large and 1 small), zest grated into the salad, then peel removed with a knife (to get the bitter membrane off too) and flesh chopped
About 6 dried figs, chopped
1 clove minced garlic
About 2 teaspoons dried mint, crumbled
Lots of chopped parsley
Olive oil
Some lemon juice because the salad wasn't quite tangy enough for my taste
A bit of salt

I call it "post-Christmas salad" because the olives, the figs, and the oranges were all bought around Christmas time and not used up. It could equally be called Project Clean Out the Pantry salad.

And yes, oranges and olives are wonderful together. The salad recipes I've seen have called for black olives, and I think that would be amazing, but green ones work great too.


And now I believe I shall wander over to the television and watch Despicable Me 2.