Chicken and Kale Filo Parcels

This dish came about because I felt like chicken, there was filo in the fridge and kale was on special...

Ingredients

• Chicken
• Kale
• Sweet potato
• Carrot
• Mixed herbs
• Grated cheese
• Filo pastry
• Butter/milk/egg (for wash)

Method

1. Pre-heat fan forced oven to 190 degrees C
2. Chop chicken and kale, both quite small/fine
3. Grate sweet potato and carrot (I didn't use a lot of either of these)
4. Fry up chicken and then add veggies and herbs and cook until kale has wilted
5.  Lay out two sheets of filo pastry together and add some mixture, sprinkle cheese on top, fold into a parcel of some sort and then place on a greased oven tray
6. Brush butter/milk/egg onto the filo package
7. Cook for about 20 min until brown

Notes:
Would probably also work with other pastry as more of a pastie.
I may also have added a chicken stock cube to the filling mixture.
A little paprika sprinkled on the packages after they have been brushed looks cool too.
I decided to try chopping the kale and grating sweet potato and carrot with a food processor and it worked ok.
I also served this with home made sweet potato wedges which were super easy and tasty.

Yummy quick GF quiche

So I'm sitting at work on Thursday morning wondering what savoury, GF, low fructose dish I could take to a picnic that night when I have 1 hour to prepare it. My brain eventually got onto pasty (coz I had some in the freezer) and then I eventually thought of quiche, that's a picnic food! So I did a few quick web searches and got a feel for the general method/cook time and wend shopping for the remaining ingredients. On arriving home I went into a mad rush trying to prepare the quiche (having never made one before) and a loaf of gf bread in 65 min and this is what I came up with, even if it took me 75 min . . .

Dish: Yummy quick quiche
Special need categories: Gluten free, low fructose
Special needs translated: Gluten free, no onion

Ingredients:

• gluten free pastry (I had a rough cut puff pastry)
• eggs 4-5
• milk 1-2 cups
• bacon (check it's gluten free)
• celery
• mushrooms
• tomato
• grated tasty cheese
• frozen spinach
• parsley
• oregano
• garlic
• salt & pepper

Method:

Start by pre-heating the oven to around 190 deg C. Then lightly oil your baking dish and lay the pasty inside. Cover with foil and bake in the oven for about 10 min.

While the crust is being pre-bake, cut up your solid ingredients and fry the bacon, celery and mushroom a pan, add the defrosted spinach, parsley and tomato to the pan right at the end to combine and heat through a little.

Whisk the eggs and mile together in a bowl and add the salt and pepper and oregano (this could have been added to the fry pan instead).

Next to assemble. Empty the pan into the baked crust, sprinkle some cheese over the top and then simply pure the egg mixture on top into the crust. I found I didn't quite have enough so whisked another egg (5th) with some soy milk (was all I had) to top it up.

Now I started baking without foil over the top and added it later but the other way around is probably a better idea. So, cover with foil and place in the oven. Bake for approx. 25 min, then remove foil and continue for another 10-20 min.

Now remember these are best guesses (as all my cooking is), I was fiddling with the temperature and time to try and speed things up a little and then left it covered in the heavy dish while in transit to try and continue the cooking a little more. Anyway, in the end, there was a small section very slightly under done but it was more than edible and tasted fantastic. It's also worth nothing that I ended up with a fairly deep quiche (fried up too many yummy fillings) and this would have affected the cooking time too.

Anyway in the end I headed out the door 10 min late with a quiche and a fresh baked loaf of GF bread, not a bad effort I think. Stay tuned for a quick review of the bread mix I used too!

Gluten Free pasty take 2

You may have read about the shenanigans of my first encounter with pastry, well armed with some bought gluten free pastry sheets from Melbourne Food Services, I eventually got around to having another try. So as before:

Dish: Gluten free pastry/pasty
Special need categories: gluten free, low fructose
Special needs translated: no gluten, no onion

Pastry:

• Frozen gluten free puff pastry sheets

Filling:

• Potato
• Celery
• Sweet potato
• Corn cut off the cob
• Carrot
• Mushrooms
• Beef rump steak
• Massel 7’s Chicken stock
• Garlic (crushed)
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Salt & pepper
• Butter

Method

As a variation on last time I decided to mash my potato to hold everything together a bit more and once again I wanted to pre-cook ingredients to save time and to ensure it was cooked through because it was going to be a bigish pastry.

Preheat oven to 180-200 deg C. (depending on size and oven)

Start by dicing, cooking & mashing the potato. I simply microwaved it in a pyrex dish and mashed with a fork, didn't add anything to it like I would when serving as a side dish.

Next dice all other filling ingredients and pre-cook them, again I used the microwave. I started with just the sweet potato in and added in the things that would take less time to cook as I went. It doesn't matter if everything isn't fully cooked as we are still going to bake it.

Add all filling ingredients except the butter to a bowl and mix through. I added a little olive oil to help things combine better.

When trying to separate my semi-defrosted pasty sheets I had a few breaks, so rather than making a traditional pasty shape I went for an over-sized sausage roll which was super easy and worked well.

Lay the pastry sheet out on a greased baking tray and put the filling down 1/3 of it, leaving some space on the outside edge to join it up. I piled it reasonably high and pushed/shaped it all together a bit as the potato will hold it in place (and everything will shrink when cooked anyway), then put a few small dobs of butter on the top. I used a fork to roughen the pasty surfaces that would be joined together and then folded the rest of the pastry sheet over the top. Spreading some melted butter on the join surface they just get pushed together and then the whole "sausage roll" is brushed with melted butter and place in oven. I think our took about 30 min too cook but it will depend on the size and temperature, because the filling was precooked it should be ready when the pastry looks good.

While it would have gone well with a good chutney/sauce/relish, we were late for a movie so we chopped it in half, wrapped it up in foil and ate as we walked to the cinema :)

New gluten free food source!

When I mentioned my failed attempt at Gluten Free (GF) pastry to a friend she pointed me toward Melbourne Food Service. They are basically a catering food supply company that have opened a store on the corner of Toorak Rd and Warrigal Rd in Camberwell and they sell a whole bunch of gluten free stuff. I picked up some frozen GF puff pastry and pizza bases to try out but I have a feeling I'll be calling in there again soon! Unfortunately they don't have any of the GF stuff listed on their web site but I'll try and get some more info next time I visit and update you on the pastry and pizza bases.

Gluten Free Cornish -almost- pasty

So I want to try making something using gluten free pastry, since I like pasties I thought I'd give it a go, while we didn't end up with pasties it was still a yummy lunch.

Dish: Gluten free pastry with filling 'thing'

Special need categories: gluten free, lowish fructose

Special needs translated: no gluten, minimal onion (only in stock)

Pastry:

• Orgrans Gluten Free pastry mix (mixed up as short crust pastry)

Filling:

• Celery
  
• Potato
• Butternut pumpkin
• Sweet potato
• Corn cut off the cob
• Zucchini
  
• Carrot
• Turnip
• Veal steaks
• Beef stock (dry/powdered) [contain onion]
• Garlic
  
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Salt & pepper
• Butter

Method

In theory all the fillings get chopped up, mixed together, placed on the pastry with a dob of butter and then wrapped up. However it didn't take us long to realised that pasties weren't going to work with the pastry we had (let me know if you have any tricks for good GF pastry, this was my first time working with pastry of any sort).

So we changed plans to make a slice with a top and bottom layer of pastry. Apparently the filling for Cornish pasties isn't usually cooked before it goes in the pastry but because we now had a bigger dish we thought it would be a good idea to pre-cook it (plus we were getting hungry!). The pre-cooking was done in the microwave in a pyrex dish, it wasn't fully cooked but the meat was starting to brown and the hard vegies just starting to soften.
A baking dish was sprayed with oil, a bottom layer of pastry added, the filling and then a top layer. It was cooked for about 45 min. The end result was a little messy to serve and eat but really really yummy.
We served it with a really tasty chutney I found at the supermarket called 'Outback Tomato Chutney' made by Outback Spirit, they seemed to have a few gluten free products and are an Australian owned family company that is partnering with Indigenous food suppliers. I'll definitely be on the look out for what else they've got.
Oh and thanks to mum and Jo for joining me in this little experiment :)