Food Riot

Like me, I am sure many of you work. Coming home late and preparing a nutritious and delicious feast in minutes, is just one of the many talents we acquire through necessity. And using up left-overs in increasingly tempting (yet affordable) ways, is another.
So – here’s a recipe to combine these talents and leave your family begging for more. In fact, you might find them cutting down on polishing their plates in an attempt to have left-overs for you to make pie with…
Ingredients for filling:

• Whatever is left over – this can be all veggies, or all meat/chicken. I find the end of a roast (chicken, beef, lamb, pork) along with the veggies and gravy are the best
• Onion
• Garlic
• Sliced mushrooms (button, brown … whatever you have lurking)
• Seasoning (salt and pepper/ cumin/chilli/Worcester sauce/soya sauce/chutney/stock powder/herbs/i.e. : whatever flavour you are looking for here)
• Margarine/butter
• Flour
• Milk

Ingredients for crust:

• 225g flour
• 100g marg / butter
• 2 teaspoons Baking Powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 or 2 teaspoons of your favourite curry powder
• Cup of grated cheddar cheese
• Water

Method:

• Lightly grease a pie dish. I usually use my lasagne dish for this – but it will depend on how much you have left over and how many you want to feed.
• Cut all of your left-overs into bite-sized chunks and chuck in.
• In a pan sweat chopped onions, garlic and sliced mushrooms in big spoon of butter.
• Remove from heat and stir in flour, then blend in milk and selected seasoning, and heat to thicken – essentially a thick mushroom sauce.
• Throw into pie dish. Mix it all up and toss in whatever else you can find in the fridge (I even added some bean salad last night!).
• To make the crust sieve flour, BP and salt.
• Rub in butter and mix in curry powder. It is up to you how hot and spicy you want to make this. If you don’t want hot – then ground cumin, ginger, coriander and turmeric will do.
• Mix in grated cheese and then enough water to form a dough. (My daughter, helping me out, decided to add the entire jug of water that I had set out for this purpose … very runny batter resulted. No problem – we simply spooned this on top of the filling and baked. Worked a treat – and we didn’t have to roll the dough out … she might have made an interesting discovery!)
• Roll dough out (or spoon it on!) to cover filling. Bake at 200°C for 20 minutes – or until crust is brown and crunchy.

I can guarantee that you will make this again!