Sunday bakes - 'good grief it's hot' gooseberry and apple pie

When I was little we used to have huge blackcurrant bushes, all around the vegetable patch. The summer used to be spent underneath these bushes, making dens in the shade that smelled of blackcurrants. In with these bushes was a single, small gooseberry bush. I absolutely love gooseberries, but they are hard to find now that we don't have that little bush anymore.
This gooseberry pie uses the tinned gooseberries, their softness boils down to a gooseberry treacle which works well with apple. cooked gently and left with a little bite.

Ingredients
One pack of shortcrust pastry
Two tins of gooseberries
One pink lady apple, cored and sliced
4 tbsp brown sugar

Method
Add the sugar and gooseberries to a saucepan and heat gently, stirring as little as necessary until the mixture is treacle like, but keep as many as the gooseberries in tact as possible.

Roll out the pastry until it's ab out 4mm thick and line a pie dish, blind bake until just starting to change colour, then cover the bottom with the sliced apples. Pour the gooseberry mixture over the top and cover with pasty.

You can either have a solid top, or cut thin slices of pastry and weave them together to form a lattice top.

Paint the pastry in milk and bake at about 180 for twenty minutes until golden brown.

I served this with an apricot and peach frozen yoghurt which worked wonderfully.

Sunday bakes – ‘I don’t know what to do with my leftovers’ pie

So I have all the left over vegetables in the world, honestly there is a fridge full. But veggies on their own and cold, can be boring. So tonight I baked a leftover pie.

Ingredients

Whatever is in my fridge, on this occasion:

2 small onions, diced

1 sweet potato, diced

3 carrots, diced

Handful of chopped cabbage

Packet of cooked chestnuts, chopped

Pack of filo pastry sheets

Rosemary

Sage

2 cloves of garlic

Vegetable stock

Method

After you have diced the vegetables fry the onion in a saucepan, add the garlic and then all the rest of the vegetables. Pour in some boiling water and add the stock. Simmer for 5 minutes until the carrots and sweet potato are cooked. Add a little plain flour to thicken the sauce. 

Line small buttered dishes with 2 or 3 layers of filo pastry then spoon the mixture into the lined dishes. Wet the edges of the pastry and pull them together across the top of the pie. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes until the pastry is crispy.