52 Recipe Challenge – Week 13.

Last week I ended up making my recipe at the end of the week but I’m posting it this week so I’m not really cheating... honest!  Last week I finally managed to escape the allure of the nearby takeaways but I mainly  stuck to my tried and tested recipes such as nachos, lemon & ginger cake cupcakes, home made pizza, chocolate chip cookies and meat & potato pie. It’s partly because I had some pastry left over from the meat and potatoes pie that I decided to make the tasty looking mushroom and spinach pastries from my Marks and Spencers Cooks’s Bible.

The recipe in the book says you need:

2 Tablespoons of butter
1 Red Onion Halved and sliced
2 Garlic Cloves, crushed
225g Mushrooms, sliced
175g Baby Spinach
Pinch of nutmeg
4 Tablespoons of double cream
225g Prepared Puff Pastry
Plain flour for dusting
1 Egg, beaten
2 Teaspoons of poppy seeds
Salt and Pepper

I actually used:

Left over puff pastry.

1 Tin of creamed garlic Mushrooms

Three frozen lumps of spinach

1 heaped tablespoon of Nutmeg

1 egg, beaten

To start with I got the pastry out of the fridge to soften, turned the oven on to 200c/ gas mark 4 to preheat and then I got the tin of mushrooms out of the cupboard. I opened the tin of mushroom and heated it in the pan for a few minutes.

After doing this I got the spinach from the freezer and added three lumps, then stirred until they defrosted and mixed with the mushrooms. Next I tried to sprinkle a little ground nutmeg into the mix but instead opened the large hole on the spice container and loads of nutmeg came out... I stirred this in hoping that the garlic would disguise the taste of the nutmeg. I turned down the mushroom and spinach mixture and roller out the pastry on a floured kitchen side and then cut it in half, after doing that I turned off the pan on the hob and brought the mixture to the pastry. 

I spooned the mushroom mix on to the pastry and covered the mix before pierceing the pastry to let steam out but then the pastry started to rip. To counteract this I tried to patch it up with pieces of excess pastry , after doing that I moved the pastry parcels on to my slightly dampened baking tray. (It said to dampen the baking tray in the recipe...)

Then I got an egg out of my fridge, beat it and then brushed it over the pastry before sprinkling poppy seeds over the parcels and putting them in the oven for 20 minutes.  Once the pastry parcels appeared done I got them out of the oven and realised that one of them had given up the ghost and ripped open.

Despite the appearance I ate the split one whilst watching Dr Who on Iplayer and packed the other one away for my lunch at work the next day.

While not the most aesthetically pleasing of foods they were alright, I over did it on the nutmeg so they mainly tasted of nutmeg with a hint of garlic; however, the pastry worked well with the poppy seeds.  I’m planning on trying to make these again with the correct fresh ingredients and reposting as these have the potential to be great