Chicken and leek pie, potato wedges, green beans, delicious sauce

This might end up being my shortest post yet as my honest feedback, given unsolicited to the empty room after the first bite, pretty much sums up everything I have to say: “ohhh – that’s good“.

But because I have set myself up as a reviewer of food, I suppose I need to actually review the food, so:

The menu I was given earlier today (see below) says that the veg today was meant to be ‘mixed vegetables’, by which I assumed they meant the ones you get frozen and which generally contain carrots, peas, sweetcorn, green beans, and one lonely broadbean (or at least I only ever seem to get one on my plate).

I don’t know if the kitchen changed its mind, or if the mixed veg contained cauliflower and the kitchen staff kindly did green beans for me instead, knowing my opinion of cauliflower (🤢, despite numerous attempts to convert me), but I got a pile of green beans and piled straight into them¹. They were decent green beans – not cooked into mush, but not with anything done to them to make them special – but they had been sitting in the sauce / gravy and that’s when I gave the room my unprompted opinion.

I’m not entirely sure what the sauce was made of: if I was going to guess (and I am) I would say it involved chicken stock,; something like sherry, reduced heavily to burn off the alcohol but leave the flavour; something herby – tarragon, perhaps? – and maybe a touch of cream.

I would love to know if my guess is anywhere near correct, but it doesn’t really matter: what matters is that it was a seriously good sauce – very savoury but with a touch of sweetness to stop it overpowering everything else on the plate, so deep in flavour you could almost drown in it, so shiny you could use your reflection to check your hair (eek, what a mess, glad no-one reading this can see me), and so tasty I forgot my manners and ran my finger around the edge of the plate to make sure I didn’t miss even the tiniest splash.

[On which: please take no notice of the rather messy plate, which was entirely my fault and not the kitchen’s – I removed the plate’s covering cloche while looking for somewhere to put it while I took photos, and inadvertently dragged it through the sauce and all over the edge of the plate. I will add “looking at what I’m doing” to the list of skills I will need to develop if I want to improve at this food blogging thing!]

While I could have happily made a lunch of a bowl of that sauce with just some good bread to mop it up, the actual main course was chicken and leek pie. I apologise for letting the sauce dominate the review so far, because it was a damn good pie: full of big pieces of chicken in a different creamy sauce – still tasty, even if not as good as the one poured over the top.

Leeks were present in spirit (or flavour) rather than in body, having largely reduced down to nothing as alliums do when cooked for a long time. The pastry was also a bit of a non-event: the top layer was there, but so thin it might as well not have been, and if there ever was a bottom crust it had dissolved happily into the pie’s filling. (Which is 100% the way it should be, of course.) Despite that shortcoming (or shortcrust-coming, hee hee. I crack myself up some times. 😅 Nvm that it’s clearly puff pastry…) it was a Very Good Pie and I asked the staff member who collected my empty plate to pass on my sincere compliments to the person who made it.

The potato wedges were nicely golden and crispy², but really needed some seasoning; I mostly used them for the purpose of mopping up the sauce. Have I mentioned that I really liked the sauce?

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I passed on dessert, not being a fan of chocolate cake (strange but true), and instead asked for a refill of my fruit bowl. And doesn’t it look pretty?

Scores (back after a short break over the weekend when I couldn’t be ars… err, bothered with them):

• Pie: 9/10 – slightly improve the pastry situation and it’s easily a 10.
• Potato wedges: 7.5/10 – crunchy, golden, excellent at moppage, but needed seasoning.
• Green beans: 7/10 – about as good as a plain cooked vegetable is going to score from me.
• Sauce – 11/10, would eat again right now if it was an option.

So not that short a review after all, but I still think my initial reaction is the only one that really matters: ohh, that was good.

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1. Presented with a plate of pie, potatoes, and green beans, I go straight for the veg. That possibly tells you something about me, although I’m not sure quite what. ↩︎
2. Which makes me wonder why the roast potatoes yesterday weren’t crispy. I had assumed it was because they had been sat in a pool of gravy, covered in a plastic cloche, and carried whatever distance from the kitchen to my room, but exactly the same thing happened to these wedges and they were still nicely crunchy. I think I have to sadly guess that the roasties were never very crunchy to begin with. 😕 ↩︎