Potato, mince and onion, and sliced apple lattice pie

 

Men are supposed to have one track minds, women insist, and yes we do but when we aren't thinking about that, we think about pies. Which pie to buy at Greggs may keep us off thinking about the woman who works at Spar for whole minutes. Normally I just buy the one that I'm advised is warmest. And yes the Steak Bake dilemma exists, you know there's always a bit of gristle, and you know if just out of the oven and even carefully bit, the bake can spew molten gravy causing many a scalded chin, but real men buy them. Never ever would a proper man buy a vegetarian sausage roll, it's just wrong. They should be banned. I'm not anti vegetable peeps but the question remains about Greggs is why do they sometimes have corned beef and potato bakes, and then you don't see them for a while, I think they use that space which could have corned beef pasties for the tray of pointless not sausage rolls.

Anyway back to men and pies, to us the above picture could just as well be on page three of a red top, we'd drool over it. And I'm not just saying that as I made it, it's true. And it was a first attempt at platting pastry.

So the above pie is potato, mince and onion, and sliced apple lattice pie, fry mince with some chopped onion, season, some beef stock but not much. Parboil some thinly sliced spuds, arrange in a flan dish in layers then top with chunks of two apples. Plat pastry and bake till golden about 40 mins.

This is my perfect pastry method, put 4 oz of plain flour in a blender, add half a teaspoon of salt, wizz, add 2 oz of lard and 2 oz of butter in, wizz till you have what looks like breadcrumbs, run a cold tap till the water is really cold, put some in a glass, add a teaspoon of white rice vinegar, wizz and slowly add as little water until the mixture starts to form a ball, immediately stop. put it in cling film and put in the fridge for at least half an hour. This is enough to cover a nine inch flan dish at about 5 mm thick.