Tag: recipe

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Erica’s “chicken” Pie, vegan

pie crust

When I stayed with Erica recently she made up this recipe which I am unashamedly stealing. To be fair this is just what I remember her doing. Her pie was better, but this was still delicious.

NB this pie is vegan. The chicken is a New Zealand product.  Sunfed Chicken is made from pea protein and has a good texture which makes it work well as “chicken” in this pie. It’s not highly flavoured a bit like chicken it works well with a variety of dishes.

A tip Erica gave me was to not move the chicken pieces round a lot when frying, unless you are going for a mince effect. So I fry on a medium heat for 3-5 minutes a side and try to flipping it over only once.

Ingredients

  • 2 sheets vegan puff pastry (I used Homebrand)
  • 1 packet Sunfed chicken pieces
  • 3 tablespoons of jam (apricot or cranberry works well)
  • 100 gm Vegan cheese slices (I used angel foods cheddar)
  • CHEESE SAUCE
  • 4 tablespoons margarin (I used olivano)
  • 4 tablespoons flour
  • 1 tablespoon cornflour
  • 600 ml oat milk (or milk of your choice)
  • 1/2 Cup nutritional yeast
  • 2 teaspoons dijion mustard
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 230 C.
  2. Fry chicken substitute 3-5 minutes a side
  3. Make up cheese sauce, see instructions below, but basically a flavoured white sauce.
  4. Oil your pie dish and lightly dust with flour and place in you bottom layer of pastry pressing gently to fit the sides. Trim the edges and bake blind for 12 minutes.
  5. Place the fried “chicken”pieces in the pie dish on top the prebaked pastry.
  6. Pour the mock cheese sauce over the chicken piece, then place mock cheese slices on top, then drop dabs of jam even over, it should no cover the whole layer but be dots here and there.
  7. Put pastry on top the lt and trim edges, make decorative slices in the pastry to let out steam and if you like decorate with left over pieces of pastry.
  8. Bake for 15.20 minutes until the top is nicely brown.
  9. CHEESE SAUCE
  10. Melt margarine in a pot, or use equivalent volume of oil.
  11. Take off heat and stir in flours returning to heat until it clumps.
  12. Take pot off heat again and add milk little by little, returning to heat when required. Add as much milk as required to make a pourable sauce. Cook until the flour in the sauce is no longer gritty or raw tasting.
  13. Add in remaining ingredients till the sauce tastes good to you.
Cuisine: Vegan, Vegetarian, pie, western, European | Recipe Type: main

 

If you are a vegetarian you could use real cheese for making the sauce or for the slices of cheese in the pie. But note that using nutritional yeast is a cost effective way of making the sauce and it tastes quite cheesy if you get the right nutritional yeast.

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Lapskaus – Stew

I made my first Lapskaus today. Which is a biggie as Jarle’s Mum makes a Lapskaus to die for. In fact I may not even tell Jarle it’s lapskaus till after he has eaten it so he does not expect it to be like his mother’s.

Jarle has been sick and is just getting his appetite back so I thought a dish that evokes childhood might be in order. That and the meat was on sale yesterday. Hard to get away from my Scottish genes.

The recipe I read a while back was on one of the Sons of Norway sites but I could not find that today for some reason.

So I found this lapskaus recipe that promises good lapskaus in 40 mins. The recipe is in Norwegian so here is my translation of it (please note my Norwegian is limited and mistakes are likely, but this is what I read it as and its cooking now. I’ll let you know at the end of the article how it turned out, as its cooking as I write.)

Lapskaus with thanks, from Marthe42 Blogspot
lapskaus with thanks from Marthe42 Blogspot

Lapskaus Recipe Translation

Amount Ingredient
about 600 grams stewing beef, eg shoulder, chuck steak
2 tablespoons butter
20 ml water or stock
1 beef stock cube
6 potatoes
3 carrots
1 thick slice swede
1 parsley root (I am guessing this is like parsnip)
about 40 ml water
1 teaspoon salt
half teaspoon fresh ground pepper
  1. Cut beef into 1.5cm cubes
  2. Melt butter in a large pot
  3. Brown meat in small batches
  4. Return meat to pot and add water/stock
  5. Wash the vegetables and peel potatoes
  6. Cut vegetables into 1 cm cubes and add to the pot
  7. Cook over a medium heat till all vegetables are cooked. Stir as little as possible so the vegetables don’t mush, but don’t let it stick on the bottom.
  8. Add salt and pepper to taste

The stew may be cooked without browning and often precooked meat is used. Serve with a coarse wholemeal bread or flatbread and cranberries.

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I am not sure why the recipe has two entries for water. What I did was just add water to the pot till it was 3/4 up the pot knowing this would almost cover the vegetables. As it turned out it 3/4 covered the vegetables so was a good big pot full of vegetables. The recipe does not call for the stew to be thickened but I did all a little cornflour to water and added it in.

For the beef stock cube I used one ice-cube of home-made chicken stock and one beef fondu. Beef fondu is something I just dicovered in Norway, it’s a is kind of a concentrated beef stock in a gel form.

Also I cheated on the vegetable front, I bought a bag of frozen lapskaus vegetables which had them all already diced. I did add more leek to the mix as the pack came with leek and I am guessing no swede or parsley root. Also we had quarter of a leek left in the fridge.

Flat Bread:

Flat bread is a uniquely Norwegian food (to me). Its hard to describe, as there is no New Zealand equivalent. But its not like a bread, more like a steam roller cracker, which has been rolled out to almost A4 size. You break a bit of one off and eat it with butter. It’s a traditional accompanyment to lapskaus. Its also very good to have dry if your feeling queasy.

Flatbrød ingrediants are, rye meal, white wheat meal, water, oatmeal, wheat bran and salt.

Box of Mors flatbrød
Mors Flatbrød, yummy with lapskaus

By the way for all those cooks out there , there’s a cool site with the equivalent ingrediant names in various languages ie: english, finnish, swedish, norwegian, danish, icelandic and russian. The top of the page lets you choose what group of foods your intersted in then you can sort alphabetically by any of the languages. It’s well worth a look.

Well all I am waiting for now is dinner time. The lapskaus smells good, but I’ll come back and update the post after we have eaten it.

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Okay the verdict after the Lapskaus has been tasted and consumed.

It was good and tasty, I am very satisfied with the result. Though Jarle says for a real lapskaus it would have more potatoes but he still says it still tastes good. So next time I think I will do the vegetables myself and see how that goes. For now though I am a happy camper having made an edible attemt at my first lapskaus. Actually next time I am going to ask Jarle’s Mum for tips…