Week 16: Steak, Mushroom and Guinness Pie

The book: Deeply Delicious (WeightWatchers)

The recipe: p103, "Steak, Mushroom and Guinness Pie"

Insofar as one of the stated purposes of the Random Kitchen was to make my culinary output less repetitive, I hadn't reckoned with the possibility that my cookbooks might actually be... well, you know, quite repetitive. With the collection including dedicated Indian, Chinese and soup cookbooks, I was anticipating a few similar dishes during the 52 weeks of this silly project, but even I was a little taken aback when random.org's choice for Week 16 turned out to be yet another variation on a theme of pie.

Now don't get me wrong:

And at least this one promises to be a little different thanks to the book it comes from. Deeply Delicious is a WeightWatchers publication that falls firmly into the "why do I own this?" category. If I were to un-rhetoricalise that question, the answer would be something like "it was cheap in the WHSmith sale a few years ago, back before I'd worked out that you kind of also need to move a bit if you want to lose weight". Whereas nowadays, thanks in part to parkrun, a modestly used gym membership and abstention from booze, I've got a better grasp of the "calories in/out" equation and can quite happily dangle the prospect of MOAR MINI EGGS in front of my mind's eye whenever I need inspiration to get and remain active. Whatever works for you, right?

Anyway, for all I may have bought it with good intentions, I have never made anything from this book before. Page corners have been turned down in anticipation, but that's all. And even if we've been in pie and pastry territory before, I'm curious to see how the WeightWatchers ethos of good health can be applied to something as seemingly incompatible as beef, ale and a layer of JusRol.

The prep: In terms of what isn't already in the house, the recipe calls for lean stewing steak (which I'm more than happy to shell out for) and sage (which I'm less happy about since I'm unlikely to use it again any time soon, but what the heck). Veg-wise, the presence of two whole onions, two sticks of celery and a punnet of button mushrooms goes some way to explaining how things are going to stay WeightWatchers-friendly here - lots of bulking out with low-calorie filler.

(Hang on, is it even called a punnet when it's not for strawberries?)

The only other thing that needs buying in is the ale, namely a bottle of the black stuff. (If your instinctive response to that sentence is "You can't drink a pint of Bovril!", we're going to get along just fine.) The recipe demands a mere 150ml of Guinness, which poses something of a logistical dilemma: I don't drink and Sam's no big fan of beer, so the remaining 350ml or so is obviously going to sit in the fridge until it gets chucked out along with the half-bottle of prosecco, the less-than-half-bottle of white wine and whatever other dregs and leftovers are lurking in there. But so be it; I'm already buying a load of sage I don't need, so I can live with some beer that'll get tipped down the sink when we get back from holiday and wonder what that smell is.

The making: This being WeightWatchers, oil is out and "low fat cooking spray" (really, no hyphen?) is in. That's fine in principle; I have a can of that one-cal stuff that I use on occasion, it's just that this isn't necessarily the right occasion. Softening the veg (onions, celery and a carrot, plus the sage) in the oil-and-water spray is fine, but I have to add a splash of actual oil to get the mushrooms going at all, and browning the cubed steak after it's been rolled in flour requires a proper glug of the stuff otherwise (a) the pan would just burn and (b) we could be here all night, frankly.

Between that and the extra pastry I'm going to end up using, the "ProPoints values per recipe: 33 | calories per serving: 330" dream is officially dead. :-(

At no point does the recipe ask me to actually mix the ingredients together in the casserole dish that will be their home for the next two hours, so I assemble layers of the onion/celery/carrot mix, the softened button mushrooms and the browned steak before pouring over some beef stock and the Guinness.

The oven has been heating up to a slow-cooker temperature of 150 degrees in the meantime, and that's where the casserole sits for the required cooking time, with occasional stirring to finally encourage mingling between the aforementioned food strata. Once the two hours are up, a trusty covering of JusRol is placed atop the filling, "a little skimmed milk" (that'll be the key to losing those pounds) is applied via careful brush strokes, a steam-valve slit is cut into the pastry topping, and back into the oven it goes for another 20 minutes or so "until risen and golden".

Et voilà: one healthy (but not that healthy) pot pie. Slice and enjoy.

The national flag of my kind of country

The eating: Not going to lie, this is pretty sweet. Obviously it's just a pie, so I shan't waste your time describing what the eating experience involves, other than to relay Sam's grumbles at frequently biting into a mushroom when he was expecting steak. A metaphor for life, there.

The WeightWatchers concessions aren't noticeably detrimental to the dish - if anything, the lean meat and modest use of oil means the filling isn't overly liquid, which makes it a whole lot easier to serve, albeit a bit less sinful - and while the slow cooking is obviously time-consuming, it's necessary in order to persuade the lean beef to become sufficiently succulent in a way that simmering on the hob wouldn't quite achieve. 

While the simplicity of the recipe means the output probably depends largely on the quality of the input (not that I splashed out on organic butcher-grade meat here, but I didn't penny-pinch either), I make this kind of thing rarely enough that the novelty value alone is enough to outweigh the lack of surprises on my plate. And you can always make it a bit naughtier by using more than the required 100g of puff pastry because you've got some leftovers in the freezer (purely as a hypothetical example, you understand) without entirely destroying the healthy intentions.

I wouldn't mind something properly different next week though. Where are the desserts, for one thing? Randomness needs to start getting a whole lot more random.

One-word verdict: "Healthy".