So apparently, it’s Great British Pie Week this week, which I think was invented by a pastry company to increase their sales but I thought it was a good excuse to write about pies.
I was noseying around our cookery book shelf and noticed this little book which apparently is full of recipes, history and snippets. Love a good snippet……so here’s a few……
• The name pie is thought to be derived from magpie because they collect a mixture of different objects and early pies contained a mixture of ingredients
• Traditional Christmas mince pies used to contain meat
• Pasties and pies were medieval street food sold by piemen, they were popular because not every house had an oven
• There’s a pie called a Bedfordshire Clanger which is a cousin of the Cornish pasty
For Great British Pie week I decided to make a vegan pie, looked in the cupboard and read a few recipes and made something up as an experiment.
I usually use butter to make pastry and didn’t have a vegan equivalent in the house so used olive oil instead. For the filling I used a small butternut squash and carrots roasted in the oven, steamed broccoli and made a simple sauce using sunflower spread, flour and vegetable stock and loads of pepper.
The verdict from the resident pieman? 7/10 due to lack of gravy. It tasted a lot nicer than it looked!!
If you fancy having a go at making a pie using a proper recipe then here’s a blog from Rachel for Bombay Potato pie. Delicious.
And we're excited to announce that we have some vegan pies on our deli today! Delivered fresh from the Great North Pie company - sweet potato and kale pies. We get their pies every Tuesday and Friday (not always vegan)
Oh and there's lots of delicious pies in our freezer too. Happy Great British Pie Week.
