With the Led Zeppelinesqe heavy rock riffs of Rush's second album Fly by Night playing through the stereo in the kitchen I first laid my hands on two heads of Fennel, a medium-sized cauliflower and a small red onion. I washed the vegetables thoroughly and then cut them up into relatively small pieces. I next put them into a steamer and left them to steam until soft for about twenty minutes.
In the meantime I prepared my pastry. I find that wholemeal pastry is the best type to use for this recipe to stop it becoming too bland for its own good. I measured out eight ounces of wholemeal flour, not wholemeal bread flour I might add, if you use wholemeal bread flour it makes it difficult to bind the ingredients together to make good pastry. I poured the flour into a mixing bowl and added four ounces of margarine to the flour. I then rubbed the ingredients together until they resembled breadcrumbs. I next poured into the bowl about two tablespoons of unsweetened soya milk and mixed it with the other ingredients. I then rubbed the ingredients together until they formed a ball of pastry. Sometimes when making this type of pastry you may need a little more soya milk than I have stated but if your pastry becomes too sticky as a result be prepared to add more flour to dry it up so you can roll it out properly.
I then put the pastry to one side for a time while I tested the steamed vegetables with a fork to ensure they were soft and therefore ready. I then turned off the heat and left them to stand. I next made a white sauce by first melting in a pan on a low light an ounce of margarine and then combining it with a heaped tablespoon of plain flour and a pinch of mustard and white pepper. I then gradually added some skimmed milk while keeping the pan on the heated hob. I continued to add in a bit of milk at a time and mix the ingredients together until I was left with a white sauce that was thicker than cheese spread. It is key for this recipe that the white sauce is as thick as possible. Once the sauce is thickened I left it on a very low heat on the hob.
The next part of the preparation was thankfully a little easier as I all I needed to do was add a quarter of a pint of boiling water to a stock cube in a measuring jug to prepare the vegetable stock. A quarter of a pint of stock is about right for this recipe as any more than this will make the pie soggier than a wet weekend in Reigate.
I now rolled out my wholemeal pastry as flat and as thinly as possible without it becoming wafer thin. I used two thirds of it to line the bottom of a pie dish about two centimetres deep and about 20-25cm across. I next piled the vegetables into the dish (in the way shown in the first picture) and poured in the vegetable stock. In order to finish off the filling I placed the white sauce on top of the vegetables and spread it over them like thick butter with my wooden spoon. I then covered the pie with the remaining pastry and pressed down the edges at the side of the pie so as to seal it totally. In order to let the heat out when cooking I cut three two centimetre long slits in the top of the pie and brushed the pastry with semi-skimmed milk. In order to make the pie oven ready I greased some foil and put it over the top of the pie so as the whole top was covered.
I was near the finish line with this recipe when I put it in my oven which I had pre-heated to 190 degrees (200 degrees if it wasn't a fanned oven). I cooked the pie with the foil on it for 30 minutes, took it out of the oven, removed the foil and then cooked it for a further ten minutes.
The complicated procedure was worth the wait as you can see from the pictures that the mix of vegetables, white sauce and stock together with the wholemeal pastry make for a pie which has all the substance of a meat pie. I chose to serve mine with boiled peas (steamed broccoli will do if you dislike peas) and plenty of brown sauce which enhances the taste even more.
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