#randomrecipes - Teviotdale Pie

This month's task for Random Recipes at Belleau Kitchen is to pick a random cutting from our saved recipes cut from magazines and newspapers. What do you mean, you don't keep recipes from magazines? In that case I don't think we can be friends...... I have half a dozen foolscap folders crammed with them, along with 10 photo albums that I used to carefully store them in back in the era when days must have had 48 hours in them, I had so much more time. Oh hang on, it wasn't longer days, it was the fact that the internet hadn't been invented AND I lived in the Far East, where I had an amah to do all the dreary stuff.

Anyway, after picking my folder via an exciting game of eeny, meeny, miny, mo,  I stuck my hand in and pulled out a page at random, well, two pages actually. Two pages had got caught up together due to a bent corner, and although they were from separate publications, I thought the recipes on them looked as if they would go pretty well together.

The first had two pies on it, a beef and chestnut one and a dish called Teviotdale Pie, which originates from the Scottish borders  and consists of a base made from minced lamb or beef, topped with a rather strange sounding suet batter. If you would like the recipe, it is reproduced almost word for word  on the All British Food website except that they don't suggest lamb as the meat. But I had lamb, so lamb it was to be.  This was from a magazine called "Country Kitchen", the January 2006 issue. I don't think the magazine was around for very long, it was rather too old-fashioned for 21st century tastes.

The second page was also from January 2006, but this time from the still-going-strong Good Food magazine. it was a suggestion for a New Year's Eve menu of braised venison, Skirlie mash and creamy savoy cabbage with carrots. I thought the mash and carrots would work well with the pie.

The pie was made by pre-cooking the lamb with onion,  dark brown sugar (I replaced this with dark Sweet Freedom), Worcestershire Sauce and stock. Then a batter of self raising flour, cornflour, suet and milk was to be poured over the top. There was no thickening in the meat layer, so as soon as I poured the batter over, it sank to the bottom. I thought it was going to be a disaster, but as it cooked, the batter rose up through the meat and made a lovely light, golden topping.

Skirlie mash is mashed potato with the addition of onion and oatmeal that have been fried together in butter, and fresh parsley. The cabbage dish is simply carrots and cabbage, shredded and cooked together, and finished with cream, butter and nutmeg.

The verdict? The Teviotdale Pie was lovely - but I think some thickening in the meat would have improved it. I'd like to try this again using my normal shepherd's pie filling that has mushrooms, carrots and peas added (and sometimes a generous slug of red wine). The topping was gorgeous - not stodgy at all, very light and well risen with a lovely crispy top. I can see me using this on other dishes too.

The potato would really have been better with just the parsley, I didn't think the oats added anything to it at all, and I didn't like the cabbage and cream combination, some finely chopped fried bacon would have been even nicer. But all in all, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint Dom by reporting that once again, my Random recipe has failed to fail!

Pear and Pecan diabetes-friendly cake

When Dom at Bellau Kitchen announced that this month's challenge at random recipes was "Something Sweet" to be chosen by an internet search, I thought at first that I wouldn't be joining in, because I'm diabetic and one of the ways I control my condition is by avoiding sweet things, apart from fruit in moderation and the very occasional use of stevia and Sweet Freedom. However I decided to see if I could find a suitable recipe. And I think most diabetics must find giving up sweet foods a huge struggle, because when I searched for "Diabetes friendly desserts" I got almost three quarters of a million results, and most of the ones I looked at contained between 10 and 30 recipes. That's an awful lot of recipes to pick from!

I just scrolled and clicked at random on a link on the first page of results, and then looked to see if the page had anything I fancied - and had the ingredients for. Many of the recipes I checked needed Xylitol, or obscure American things like "fat free unsweetened condensed milk" that I probably wouldn't buy even if I could. Oh, and a lot of the pages were riddled with pop ups, hundreds of the darned things that popped up over and over again faster than I could close them and filled my computer up with soup. Now I've remembered why I still use recipe books!

So it was a huge relief to find this recipe for Pear Spice Cake With Toasted Walnuts - at this point I'll let you pop over to have a look at the recipe and the gorgeous photos, and get the puerile (should that be puellile in my case?) laughter at the line "I highly suggest you toast your nuts before you use them" out of the way before you read on.

I followed the recipe exactly, apart from replacing the walnuts with pecans, one of the suggested variations, simply because my bag of pecans was already open. My experiments with baking diabetes friendly cakes in the past have resulted in a sad, heavy mess but this worked much better.

The result - I absolutely love it! Mark isn't so keen. I don't think it's sweet enough for him and he finds the cinnamon too strong. He also said it was slightly underdone in the middle, but I quote from the recipe " the center had a pudding like texture that was creamy & indulgent" so I reckon I nailed it. Sorry, Dom, but I appear to have had yet another #randomrecipes success.

I'm joining in with Random Recipes at Belleau Kitchen  and #CookBlogShare at Supergoldenbakes

Savoury Bean Bake - a Random Recipe

This month's Random Recipes is a straightforward random book, random page challenge. And the book my random number took me to was the second recipe book I ever got, bought for me using Mum's cigarette coupons, back in 1969 - Cookery in Colour by Marguerite Patten. Little did Mum know she was starting me off on a habit for life - and I don't mean smoking. My house is gradually being taken over by recipe books!

I opened it at random (cheating really, I know the book so well that I knew I'd  be opening it somewhere in the vegetable section) and came to a page with 6 recipes on it. I could have happily, and nostalgically, made any of them (except perhaps the one whose ingredients were simply a tin of asparagus, a tin of condensed chicken soup and four boiled eggs - I do have standards, you know) but Savoury Bean Bake was one for which I already had all the ingredients to hand, so I chose that.

It is simply a mixture of tinned baked beans, fried onions, chopped boiled eggs and grated cheese, topped with more cheese and breadcrumbs and baked. Not the kind of thing I'd usually use a recipe for, more the kind of thing I'd make up as  I went along on a "using up odds and ends" day. But I'm a good girl, I follow the rules, so I assembled all the ingredients, including

2 tomatoes, skinned

Then I read the method. Those tomatoes, all skinned and slithery in my hands, were  not mentioned anywhere. They're there in the ingredients, but after that they are redundant. Should they be chopped and added to the beans? Sliced and  added as a separate layer? Baked as a side dish? Discarded completely? Oh, Ms Patten, I thought you were infallible! I've been using your book for 45 years, I'd never dream of using any other recipe for blancmange, flapjack or sage and onion stuffing, but this time you've really left me holding the tomatoes!

I took an executive decision to chop them and add them to the mixture, which by now was looking decidedly like sick.

It looked a bit better by the time it was in the gratin  dish:

And a LOT better by the time it came out of the oven.

 

Naturally I served it with chips and peas, as a tribute to my  Mum. When I was growing up, every meal was served with chips and peas with the exception of Sunday Roast, Christmas Dinner and that well known dish, A Salad. (And on those occasions Dad would complain "Where's the chips?"). Even "curry" (you know the dish,  minced beef, sultanas, apples and a pinch of stale curry powder) was served with rice, chips and peas.

The verdict? Fine, but not really the kind of meal Mark and I often eat nowadays. But on a nostalgic day that had seen me eat prawn cocktail, complete with shredded iceberg lettuce, for lunch, it slotted in very nicely. And next time  I'm clearing out the fridge I'll have another idea for using up odds and ends. But I won't bother with a recipe next time.