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.

You need:
* 160g of basic savoury bread sponge – there’s plenty of recipes for this on the web.
* 120g plain white flour
* 40g stoneground flour
* 75g water
* pinch of salt
* about 10 ml olive oil

Mix all the above together, knead until smooth and leave to rise for an hour.

For the filling I used (apologies for the lack of quantities, I can’t remember exactly how much)
* castello blue cheese (Andrew uses gorgonzola which Sainsbury’s didn’t have, but I think would work better)
* green peppers
* mild sweet peppadew piquante peppers, which we’re really addicted to at the moment
* red onions

I fried the onions, then added the green peppers, and finally mixed in the piquante peppers and the cheese.

To construct the calzoni you need to divide the dough into four and roll gently into rounds. Leave to relax for 2 minutes and then roll out into a circle about 15cm diameter. This bit was the really fun bit. The dough is so nice and soft and stretchy and quite forgiving. You can throw it around and pretend you work at dominos.

Brush the edges with egg, put a dollop of filling in the middle and fold over. Finally brush the tops with beaten egg and leave to prove for an hour. Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes.

To be honest the filling wasn’t a huge success. The creamy blue cheese, bitter green pepper and sweet and spicy red peppers clashed a bit. However the dough was so nice and soft and light that they were gone within 5 minutes flat. Even the two I’d made for lunch the next day.

I’ll definitely try this again but experiment with some different fillings. They taste fantastic fresh, but they could also be good things to make a batch of at the weekend for lunch during the week.

Any suggestions for fillings? Andrew says it’s better to go for things that don’t change in size dramatically when cooked otherwise you end up with an empty calzoni.

This recipe is a king of thrift and simplicity. Quite often if we’re making a quick meal utilising some time saving pie technology (shop bought pastry) we end up with a surplus of puff or shortcrust. We’ve started trying to use it up by making lunch time snacks.

There really wasn’t much to it – roll out the pastry into rectangles roughly 6″ X 8″, fairly thin. Fry up some onion. I used some off-cuts of Salmon which are signifcantly cheaper than the nice slices – you don’t need pretty pieces for a pie. Just shred them up a bit if needed. We added some crumbled Feta, we always seem to have some feta in the fridge (cos it lasts ages). Stuff it all in one half of the rectangle, fold and seal using your fingers. Poke a couple of slits in the top, stick it in the oven for ~ 15mins. Done.

They tasted fairly nice. If we’d planned it beforehand I’d probably substitute the Feta, it was slightly too salty. Goats cheese and add some spinach could work.