Tuesday this week was…well, I think it’s best to pretend that it didn’t happen.

But there was one small success.  I invented the Corned Beef Hash Pie (maybe not actually invented, but I’d not heard of it and definitely not baked it before).  And unlike many of my ‘made up in my head’ attempts, it was surprisingly well received.  This was a particular achievement as I’m vegetarian, so couldn’t do any taste testing and had no clue if it was actually edible.

So, should you need to whip up an old school meal for people who utterly believe that the only vegetables required in life are chips and the cocoa in chocolate, and who therefore tend not to add anything other than the key part of a meal to their plate, here’s what you do:

• Line a pie dish with 2/3 pack of puff pastry and pop in your baking beans, blind cook it at 200 for about 10 mins, tip the baking beans out, prick the bottom a few times with a fork to stop any puffing and pop it back in for 10 more minutes.
• Fry up a chopped onion and carrot, throw in the corned beef and break it up.
• Add some splashes of Worcestershire sauce, a squeeze of tomato puree and an oxo cube dissolved into a bit of boiling water.
• Let it all bubble a bit.
• Throw in a tin of beans.
• (No need for salt if your beans are not the salt free ones and no need for pepper if your dad insists that ‘the flavour is too strong’.)
• Give it a stir.
• Spoon the filling into the pastry covered pie dish.
• Top with the rest of the puff pastry.  (Stick the cooked bit together with the uncooked bit using a bit of milk and a sprinkling of creativity)
• Poke a knife through the top to let out the steam (is that why we do that?)
• Pop it back in the oven for 20-ish minutes.

No need to serve with anything as all the sides are inside 🙂

And that was that.

It was also Stepson 2’s Prom.  Mr R took him and his mates in style, dressed as a chauffeur.   And it was our third wedding anniversary.  We’d planed a Top of the World picnic after chauffeur duties were complete, but the weather had other ideas so we had our picnic in our kitchen instead.  I’ll leave you with those photos as I think they are marginally more interesting than one of a tin of corned beef…

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