Now Thats What I Call Cooking!

At last today I got the chance to make something I could only have dreamed of making a few months ago. Proper food. Not this arty farty nonsense. Something you can get your teeth into - pork pie! Yes, pork again I'm afraid, but this time used for what it was born for.

Making a pork pie is however not a simple exercise, I have discovered. There were a couple of sticky moments along the way. Those of you from Sheffield (and maybe elsewhere) will be familiar with the phrase "hand-raised pork pie". For years I thought this meant that the little baby pies were allowed to run around the living room of the butcher feeding on tidbits until they were big enough to be eaten. But I was wrong. The phrase refers to the raising of the pastry around the body of the pie, which to make a proper pie rather than a supermarket one, needs to be done by hand. I'm not sure whether my pies were intended to qualify as "hand-raised", but that's the way things turned out.

First I made the hot water pastry dough, which basically involves pouring a panful of lard melted in water into a bowl full of flour. Once it has cooled a little, the pastry is flattened, and wrapped round a greased bowl, or jam jar, then allowed to cool, the idea being it hardens into the required shape. The jar is then removed, leaving the casing intact, and the filling is inserted. Well that's the theory anyway. In my case, when I came to remove the jar from inside the pastry, it wouldn't budge an millimetre. After several failed attempts, I had to completely unwrap the pastry from the jar, until it looked like Morph on a bad day. I then rebuilt the pastry as best I could, popped the filling in, fashioned a top and pinched it all together.

The next tricky bit was tying greaseproof paper around the pie to hold it together while it cooked (this was supposed to be done when it was still on the jar, but alas all my good work had to be undone to get the damn thing out). I was working with American Kate today, and it was a two man job to get the paper and strong in place and tied up, before the pies went in the oven for an interminable 2 1/2 hours. They didn't come out until 4, too late for lunch. Tomorrow I have to pour in the jelly, and that was issue number 2: the damned gelatine wouldn't set. Lizzie was mystified. "Are you sure you put gelatine in it?" she asked, staring into a measuring jug containing a very fluid looking stock. "What did you DO?" Well Lizzie, I did what it says in the book, and I have to say, along with everyone else on the course, I HATE GELATINE. It's now sitting in the fridge. Lets hope it falls asleep overnight, like an injured goldfish.

So, we won't know until tomorrow how successful the pies are, but they certainly look good so far as you can see.

Here's another thing about Edinburgh which is rather cute. The buses all have tartan seat covers. Nothing surprising about that. I'm not sure which tartan it is, but its predominently blue with red and white stripes. At the front of the upstairs of the double deckers there is a TV monitor, which displays pictures from each of the cctv cameras on board in turn. This is either to keep us mildly entertained, or more likely, to warn us we are being watched. Thing is, the TV monitor has a lovely little tartan surround to it, made out of the same material as the seat covers. Its like a little warm TV kilt.