Pastry - and pasties

OK, so I don't want you to think I'm getting too big for my boots here, but allow me to whisper something

*I may have cracked pastry*

There. I won't say it too loudly, but 3 times in as many weeks, I have made pastry and it's worked out OK.

Admittedly not 'short as short' shortcrust pastry, but pastry nonetheless.

First, I made Hugh F-W's swede and potato pasties from Veg Everyday, which involves his rough puff pastry. A bit of rolling and turning is required, but really, this is very little effort pastry and tastes brilliant.

Then, a rather unusual rapeseed oil and spelt flour affair as part of a leek tart that appears in Rose Elliot's 30 Minute Vegetarian. My mother in law was down for the weekend a couple of weeks ago. She is a vegetarian and this book is a great resource - the meals are brilliantly easy, very tasty and dead quick. Not necessarily a good thing, I'll grant you, if you were hoping to escape to the kitchen for a while - although don't ask ME why you'd want to do that, oh no... But I digress. I'd planned this for Sunday lunch, but she had to leave early, so we spent the day in the garden and I made this for tea. And in case you were wondering, because she'd gone home, I added some ham. 

The pastry literally involved mixing the flour and oil together with a little water, then rolling it out between clingfilm 

 

before lining the tin and baking blind. 

OK, so may be a little patching was required

The Husband thought it was a bit odd - it does have quite a strong flavour - a combination of the rapeseed oil and the spelt flour - and the texture of the pastry, once baked was a little crumbly, but I liked it. Actually, the tart as a whole was pretty good. Pink didn't like it that much, but Blue who I was expecting to wail and moan about it, pronounced it delicious. The filling is what you'd expect from a quiche, but without the eggs. You thicken the filling (cream, leeks, say no more) with cornflour, pile it into the pastry case, and give it a final blast in the oven.

Thus inspired, and hot on the heels of my outing with the kids in Daisy to Bracknell forest last week, we loaded up the van last Sunday, and headed out to a relatively local beauty spot/place of interest called Combe Gibbet (or 'Combe Giblet' as Pink rather endearingly insisted on calling it). As you might have guessed, it's a hill where they used to hang people. Rather a grisly destination, but the kids were pretty delighted by the potential horror of it all, and all things considered, the view was pretty spectacular at the top.

It was quite windy, though!

"All this wind plays havoc with one's hairdo..."

Anyway, an outing requires a picnic, so I used my new found pastry confidence (and the fact that I had no plain flour left in the cupboard, only spelt flour) to adapt the swede and potato pasties from Veg Everyday to make some mini swede, leek and potato pasties.

We ate them with brown sauce, followed by left over chocolate cake. A feast indeed!