Wednesday, July 14, 2010

What do you MEAN the Store is out of Garlic?!


Grocery shopping is about to get infinitely more frustrating as apparently Loblaws workers are going on strike for "an extended period of time." No matter: they consistently have absolutely nothing I need. They stopped selling canned artichoke hearts for Pete's sake!

Which brings me to today's challenge: Chicken Pie! This is all I'll be doing today, aside from some online window-shopping and that rockabilly dance night for one.

Sounds like the life, huh? Unfortunately, this recipe is VERY involved. It's not my usual chicken-and-mushroom-in-a-cream-sauce pie, this is traditional Kiekenpastey.

Now here's the weird thing about dutch recipes: the description begins by saying that this was "traditionally a sweet pie containing ginger, cinnamon, saffron and plenty of sugar."

Now that's fine. But where, along the way, did chicken find its way in? A clue: "Later, the ingredients included cocks' combs, sweetbreads and chestnuts in an open pastry case."

I can't wrap my head around how THAT must have happened...

Anyhow, the recipe has thankfully been updated to be, well, less gross. The filling consists not only of chicken, but also pork sausage and ground veal. So we've got our barnyard animals covered.

But guess what else! It's also got mushroom-stuffed artichoke bottoms! And homemade bread dough for the crust instead of pastry!

You can see now why I need a whole day to do this. Especially since I couldn't find artichoke bottoms for the life of me.

The picture in the book has cute little heart cutouts in the top. If my version has the same, we'll know I somehow had fun in the process.