What I Ate Today

May’s In the Bag was hosted by Real Epicurean and consisted of Broccoli and Blue Cheese. Over the past few weeks we’ve been getting some gorgeous Purple Sprouting Broccoli from our veg box which seemed perfect for my attempt. I really wanted to try and challenge myself to come up with something less obvious again. A couple of weeks ago we made a delicious spicy roasted broccoli and cheese Indian dish from an Atul Kochhar recipe. In all my attempts to think of something asian based with the ingredients, I kept being stumped by the Blue Cheese which kept limiting me to European cuisine. I can’t wait to see what everyone else comes up with.

In the end, tired of missing out on the aspargus love-in going on various food blogs I follow, I caved in and opted for an Asparagus, Broccoli, Mushroom and Blue Cheese Pie. Unfortunately, our veg box still hasn’t supplied any asparagus so we had to opt for the supermarket stuff which was passable – nowhere near as tasty as the farm shop stuff we tend to get this time of year.

As when making any form of pie, I tend to turn to Pie Minister for inspiration. This one was loosely based on their great Wildshroom and Asparagus. I read somewhere in an interview with one of the PM guys that his top tip would be to experiment with the pastry, in this I decided to try it with a twist of Nutmeg.

Ingredients

When I made this, I did it all by eye so I’m not entirely sure of the amounts I used. If I’m honest this probably could have fed 3-4 adults. I won’t tell you how many it did – ‘We only had salad with it’ was Jenny’s defence though.

• 8 oz Purple sprouting broccoli
• 6 Asparagus Spears, 1″ long chunks
• 8 Button mushrooms, sliced
• 4 Shallots, sliced
• 2 Garlic Cloves, sliced
• 2 oz Butter
• 2 tbsp Plain flour
• Soya Milk (Unsweetened)
• 2 oz Blue Cheese
• Ready made pastry
• 1 tsp Ground Nutmeg
• 1 Egg, beaten

I tend to use soya milk because I prefer the slightly nutty taste in cooking, cow’s milk would be fine too. We ended up using Danish Blue cheese since we didn’t have a huge selection and it’s not quite as strong as some of the other choices.

Method

1. Heat just less than an oz of Butter in a pan, add the Shallots and Garlic for a couple of minutes.
2. Add the Broccoli, Asparagus and Mushrooms, cook for ~8 minutes or just before the Mushrooms get juicy.
3. Meanwhile, make a roux with the remaining Butter and Flour. If you’ve not made roux before, heat the Butter until fully melted then add the Flour gradually until fully blended (stir thoroughly!).
4. Make sure the mixture isn’t too hot before adding the Milk, mix in.
5. Crumble the Cheese slowly into it. You may need to play with the portions of milk/flour to get the right texture and amount.
6. Pre-heat the oven to 180 C.
7. Get Jenny to roll out the Pastry for you, telling her to mix in the Ground Nutmeg (you can see some in the photo above). Separate into two pieces – one for the base and one for the lid.
8. Lay the slightly bigger one on the bottom of your dish, add the filling, brush some beaten Egg around the edge to help it seal, cover with lid. Make pretty patterns around the edge with your fingers.
9. Get child/Jenny to make decorations out of remaining pastry for the lid. Glaze with Egg.
10. Cook for ~25 mins or until golden.

Although, the recipe wasn’t particularly revolutionary, Jenny’s unique mushroom and ‘asparagus’ pie decoration certainly was.

The filling was just right – the veg still had some sort of texture to them rather than turning into mushy pulp, there was plenty of the cheese sauce to keep it moist without being overly blue-cheesey. The pastry was pretty good, the nutmeg worked well but was still some way off from a PM pie.