Steak and Ale Pie… and Cheese Straws

During the week Kerri ordered a lovely red pie dish. We had planned to make pie during the week, but some semi-unplanned midweek partying laid waste to those plans. So we tried it last night and were struck with some of the karma of having put it off during the week.

Steak and Ale pie it was, and the filling needed to be simmered for an hour and a half. We left the saucepan in the care of our slightly dodgy hob but the lowest setting of the smallest burner was too high and when we came back to check on it (after only an hour rather than an hour and a half), we found that it had cooked dry and half of it had burned. So we sorted through it all and cut off the burned sections of the burned bits and added some more stock, along with some parsnip in the hope that a bit of sweetness would counteract the burned taste. It tasted good in the end, but we’d lost some of the filling and that caused the pie lid to sag in the middle.

Sadly the lovely red pie dish isn’t really visible in that picture; I’ll be more attentive to such detail next time.

We made cheese straws with left-over pastry; they worked without a hitch 🙂