Chicken pie

Funny how much I love chicken pie, and yet I've been in the UK for almost three years and not attempted to make it.

I guess ready availability has something to do with it, but recently my friend Siew Ching showed me shots of her creations and that got me motivated.

I looked up a few recipes and decided to, well, make it up as I went along!

First, I fried some bacon in olive oil. Then I added chopped mushrooms and tossed the lot about for about 5 minutes.

While that was coming along, I put my diced chicken breasts in a plastic bag with some plain flour and dried thyme, and tossed it about to get it all well coated.

I fried the chicken lightly in butter in a separate pan, and then added it to the bacon-and-mushroom mix.Then I added celery and frozen peas. I didn't cook the peas in the microwave as I didn't want them to become mushy by the time they come out of the oven.

I then added two bay leaves, a tin of mushroom soup (yes, the regular supermarket kind), and pepper to taste. Don't cook it for too long - you will have the pie in an oven at 200 degC for about 20 minutes so it'd have plenty of time for flavours to come out.

For my first attempt, I used both filo pastry and shortcrust pastry.

The filo pastry was a FLOP!

This was before it went in the oven...

It came out like this...

The shortcrust pastry version was much more successful!

It came out like this!

Ray said it's the best pie he's ever had - he liked the strong thyme flavour. See why I married him?! :)