Week 7: Chicken and Leek Pot Pie

The book: How To Cheat At Cooking (Delia Smith)

The recipe: p119, "Chicken and Leek Pot Pie"

Saint Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking caused quite the controversy on its initial release, but the principle always struck me as a laudable one - people in the modern commutersphere are time-poor but relatively resource-rich (and generally not lacking in local supermarket options compared with the Bad Old Days), so why not couple that with a desire to still knock out something approximating home-cooked grub instead of relying on ready meals all the time?

That having been said, our copy of this particular book, acquired from a charity shop not long after the aforementioned controversy, has never yet prompted me to actively delve into its pages. That's right: while some of the Random Kitchen books are merely criminally under-used, this one was entirely unused. Until now. God bless you, random fairies.

It's not a bad-looking book at all, to be honest, even if Delia clearly couldn't be arsed when it came to some of the recipe titles:

Name. Bothered.

A chicken and leek pot pie sounds more like an Actual Tangible Thing, though. Worryingly, in the introduction Delia describes this as "an unlikely sounding combination". Chicken and leek, unlikely? Really? Maybe we've had a different set of life experiences but that seems like a fairly obvious pairing to me. Perhaps she's been on the vermouth the recipe calls for.

The prep: The "cheating" that led to such outrage at the time primarily involves purchasing ready-made ingredients from prominently named High Street retailers. In this particular case, that means popping into the Lewisham branch of M&S and picking up a tin of chunky chicken in white wine sauce for a good quid more than I'd have paid for the Sainsbury's equivalent.

Jus-Rol puff pastry is also on the list; otherwise it's all quite standard stuff, although fresh tarragon is a surprise in a recipe that's supposed to be about ease of assembly - I apply my own cheat and use dried instead, natch.

The making: The convenience championed by the book isn't hugely in evidence here, as I have to prep and chop a leek and carrot before softening them with some butter, then add two tablespoons of vermouth and let that bubble down and reduce. (I use the Shaohsing rice wine from last week - same intent and end result, really. By this stage I am officially even cheatier than Delia.)

That all gets stirred into a bowl containing the tinned chicken, a tablespoon of crème fraîche and the tarragon.

That mixture then gets spooned into a small pie dish, over which the pastry is arranged and trimmed before being brushed with beaten egg - another bowl for the washing-up pile, hurrah!

The whole thing then goes into the oven for half an hour and comes out looking very much like a pie.

Very much like a pie

Delia suggests serving it "with a leafy, green vegetable such as spinach". Even with pastry and a creamy sauce to dig into, that sounds a little insubstantial, so I also roast some beetroot with thyme and balsamic vinegar and a fistful of asparagus (separately, separately!) for good measure.

The eating: Pies without a base tend to serve poorly from an aesthetic point of view, invariably collapsing into a baby food-like mush with some sad-looking pastry sat on top, and so it was here. There's something inherently satisfying about a good pie filling, though - northern as I am, I could happily shovel it into my gob all day long - and there's no real faulting the outcome of this week's Random Kitchen experiment in the taste department.

I don't do presentation

The question is more whether all of Delia's cheats really had the desired effect. Pastry aside, there's nothing here that I couldn't have done from scratch almost as easily, and with a similar amount of washing-up to tackle afterwards (i.e. lots). And if you're going to essentially use pre-prepared ingredients for the filling - with all that entails in terms of salt content, freshness and quality, not to mention price - then you might as well just shell out a fiver for a decent supermarket pie in the first place and save yourself the bother.

Don't get me wrong: there are some recipes in How To Cheat At Cooking that look more promising and where you can see how the corner-cutting would make a real difference, and if nothing else, random.org has made me take a proper look inside a previously neglected book and fold down a few page corners for future reference. This one, though, can remain unfolded.

One-word verdict: Pointless.