Chicken and leek pie, mash, sweetcorn, gravy

Some days my love of cooking runs headlong into my limited reserves of energy, and it’s anyone’s guess which will win. Therefore today, after a stressful day that included multiple phone calls, one including the patronising line “well, that’s not an emergency now is it, Cathryn?” about something that the issuer of that line conceded a few moments later actually was an emergency, I decided to spend some of my last remaining spoons on making a homemade pie.

This pie is going to be one of the centrepieces of my low spoons cookbook, which I intended to make a start on writing just before the aforementioned telephone conversation, as it’s easy to make and can adjust in pretty much any direction you care to go. Don’t fancy pie?¹ Have the filling with pasta or rice. Don’t like / have leeks? Use onions, or mushrooms. No chicken? Use turkey, or bacon – or turkey bacon, for that matter. Vegetarian or vegan? Use your favourite faux meat, or just lots of veggies, and replace the dairy milk with plant milk.

[Quick diversion of brain power to look up the name of a plant in an incidental background shot of a programme on tv that I’m not watching but just glanced up at: one of those “I know I know it. Begins with an “L”. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Hang on, I’ll Google it….

It was a sisyrinchium (sp?), so not an L, or on the tip of my tongue, although I did know it.]

Anyway, we had the pie with mash (Tesco Finest, from the chilled section, which I can strongly recommend – it’s properly buttery and creamy, just what you want from a bit of mash), sweetcorn, and some gravy (from granules, but no worse for it): mum cleared her plate and finished with an unprompted “that was nice”, so that’s two Mum-chelin stars.

The dessert, of microwave chocolate pudding and ice cream, got even more stars, but of course cake and ice cream is always going to get high scores from the majority of people.

So that’s another day done and my personal cutlery store almost emptied of spoons. On the plus side, I now have my missing meds although, on the negative side, I only have enough for the weekend thanks to a snafu by the GP surgery. Oh well, that’s a problem for Monday Cat. Friday Cat is going to sign off and continue exchanging mild double entendres with mum to entertain ourselves through the rest of Gardeners’ World, which we’re watching only because it includes a piece about the Isle of Wight. Which I’m now going to watch.

TTFN!

1. Not that that’s something that anyone thinks very often. ↩︎