Breakfast Pie

Woo Hoo!  We've finished the hedge-laying - all 70m of it!  Yesterday we put the finishing touches to it by planting in the gaps and weaving twigs and branches into the bottom to protect the new shoots.  That means that we can now plant our new hedge to divide the field (didn't want to do that while we were felling quite big trees or it'd get squashed).  We are also going to plant a few fruit trees in our bit - I think Rob and Becky are going to plant some in their half too, so they should all happily pollinate each other.  In my week off we also chopped down the other half of the Sycamore next to the beer bench (we did the first half last year) which was quite big and overhanging the bridleway.  We started sorting through the timber left by the quarry when they cleared the bit opposite, so we now have lots of wood to log (and loads more to pull out) which is all good.  We're going to hire a log-splitter for a weekend and get it all sorted at some point, it'd just take sooo long to split it all by hand.

We had a good few days in Hereford - strange for us to stay in a city (just 10 mins walk from the centre) instead of out in the middle of nowhere, but it made a nice change.  We had to do an emergency funeral before we set off though.  Bob went to let the chickens out for a bit before we went and found Dot stretched out on the floor of the chicken house.  Usually we have a fairly good idea that one is going to die because they go off their food, look pale and listless, but she was her normal greedy self the day before so we had no inkling at all.  She hasn't laid eggs for a couple of years and definitely ate more than her fair share of everything so perhaps that had something to do with it!  So, we have two second-hand chickens on order and should be able to get them in the next few weeks, just depends when the next cull at the chicken farm is.  Horse and Lottie both seem well and are looking pretty smart after their Winter moult.  Lottie was laying an egg every other day without fail until Horse started laying again (they stop for a while in the Winter), but since Horse started, we haven't seen a single egg from Lottie?????  Does that mean there's a pile of eggs under a bush or something?!

Way back on a rainy, cold day in November, we'd finished eating lunch and were sitting round the table when one of us brought up the idea of a breakfast pie.  An hour and a half later we'd come up with a plan with drawings and everything.  It was a very detailed planning meeting covering everything from what should be incorporated, how to segregate it so you don't get black pud if you don't like it to whether it should include fried bread (it shouldn't by the way).  By far the most time-consuming bit was how to have the eggs and how to keep the yolk runny.  So, three months later and after much subsequent discussion, we finally got round to making the prototype this weekend for Sunday brunch.  This is how it goes - shortcrust pastry base followed by a mixture of beans and cooked mushrooms, then a layer of thinly sliced cooked sausage.  Now it gets a bit complicated - an outer ring of either black pud or sausage and then partition walls to match and divide the pie into portions.

Crack an egg into each partition . . .

. . . carefully lay cooked bacon on top, trying
not to pop the eggs followed by more of the
bean/mushroom mix.  Add the pastry lid being
careful to mark it in some way to show the partitions
and indicate which bits have black pudding.

And, tah dah!  One very tasty (and very
filling pie.

It should be noted that this is the prototype and more work needs to be done on its design - namely, how on earth do you cook the pastry, but keep the yolk runny?  We hoped by cooking all the ingredients and keeping the pastry thin and with the eggs in the middle they might just stay a bit runny, but they didn't.  Very tasty, but how fantastic it'd be to cut into your portion and yolk oozes out . . . . . . work in progress!