A couple of days ago, I made a variation of the pie using oil pastry. This is in fact, more or less, the original pie where I first made oil pastry on cheap family recipes, although we steamed it as a pudding there.

When I made it it was evening, so I thought I would wait to take a picture until the next day, when the light would be better. And of course, I forgot until we had eaten the other half too. So here is a picture of another pie, which looks practically the same.

As I did for the pizza, I took the 454g of meat after we had had our roast lunch, and added an estimated 200g of meat for that. So a total of 654g of chicken meat divided by the £4.99 cost, disregarding anything from the stock completely.

Pastry
200g flour, 45p/1.5kg, 6p
100ml oil, Aldi £1.25/litre, 12p (currently showing as on offer, so cheaper than this)
about 100ml water

Filling
100g chicken, 76p
3 stuffing balls, 1/6 value pack/15p, 2p
a very large onion, or 2 medium ones, 10p
half of the gravy made with the juices when we had a roast chicken dinner
Total cost £1.06, 26p a portion

Prepare the pastry using the oil method . To do this, put the flour in a bowl, tip in the oil. Then add the water. You may need a little more, or a little less, all flours are different. Simply stir gently with a tablespoon, and it will come together in a few seconds to make a soft dough, don’t over mix, or the pastry will toughen. If it is looking a little dry while you stir, add a little more water. If too wet, add a little more flour.

For the filling, saute the onion until transparent. Chop the chicken into small pieces and add to the pan, together with the gravy and the chopped up stuffing balls. Stir it well and season if necessary. If you don’t have any gravy available, add a little water to make some sauce. Leave the mix to cool.

Meanwhile, divide the pastry into rough halves. One half needs to be slightly bigger than the other. Using the bigger half, flour your work surface and roll out to fit a 20cm pie tin and line your tin with it.

Put the chicken and onion filling into the pie tin. Roll out the other piece of pastry and top your pie with it. Make a steam hole and bake in a medium oven for about half an hour.

If your filling is still warm, it’s not the end of the world. I often make pies while the filling is still fairly hot and it’s fine.

We had this with sweet potato mash, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower.

If you like steamed puddings, this can be done exactly the same, but use a pudding basin and steam it for 2 hours. I would do that in a slow cooker to save the fuel.

Any meat can be used in place of the chicken. Turkey for instance, or pork mince. I will do the variation with mince and onion sometime soon, that turned out lovely.

The same day, I used half the chicken stock I made earlier to make a spicy lentil soup. The other half of the stock is in the freezer to use for risotto. The remaining chicken is also in the freezer, divided up and labelled with the planned use.

1 onion, 5p
350g red lentils, £1/500g, 70p
half the stock made using the chicken skin and bones, made up to 1500 ml with hot water
1 carrot, Asda 2kg/£1.18, 100g, 12p
1 stick celery, Asda 80p/head, avg 12 sticks, 7p
1 tsp salt
tsp turmeric, Asda TRS 69p/100g, 5g 3p
tblsp garlic and ginger paste. I used some from the massive pot I got from an Indian shop
if you can’t get that, mySupermarket is showing Asda minced ginger £1.28/210g, and garlic paste in a jar, £1.30/210g. So 10g of each of those would be 6p & 6p, 12p
Total of £1.09. Made 6 portions, so 18p a portion

Saute the vegetables until the onion is transparent. Add everything else and simmer for 20 minutes. Whizz if you want to, I usually do.

Again, some was eaten, and the remaining portions divided up and frozen for later use.

Tally so far from one £4.99, 1.5kg chicken, with more to come yet
roast chicken dinner, 2 portions
pizza and salad, 4 portions
chicken and onion pie, 4 portions
spicy lentil soup, 6 portions
Total 16 portions