Week 41: Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese

The book: Masterclass (James Martin)

The recipe: p22, "Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese"

You've noticed it too, right? It's very much the elephant in the room: the Random Kitchen project just keeps on bumping into pies and pastry products. There are clearly a lot of them nestled among my 22 cookbooks.

Maybe it's a reflection of my interests, maybe it's down to the limited imagination of cookbook authors, or perhaps it's simply because pies are the kind of thing that can look quite impressive without necessarily requiring that much effort, hence making them ideal cookbook fodder.

In any case, here we are again, with another "pie" that isn't actually a pie pie, more "some stuff assembled in a dish with a sheet of puff pastry layered on top". Still, it's a properly vegetarian recipe (subject to how the goat's cheese is made, I suppose) and that's something we don't encounter too often on this blog, so let's give it a go!

Paj time, it's paj time, paj moment

The prep: Despite my pie fatigue, I'm so eager to get going that I find myself at the Lewisham Shopping Centre a whole quarter of an hour before the shops actually open. (Oops.) Fortunately, the trusty café in the central holding pen is already open for business, so I settle in and nurse an Americano while people-watching and listening to the greatest misses of Eurovision.

The recent demise of our fridge-freezer meant all those lovely leftovers of Jus-Rol pastry from previous Random Kitchen adventures had to be consigned to the great dustbin in the, er, backyard - so ready-made puff pastry is the first thing on my shopping list, along with the various vegetables that we don't have in the new and mercifully functional fridge. Among them are "banana shallots", which cause me a moment of panic before I do a Google image search and realise that's what they are.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note at this point that the actual name of this recipe ends "...with Dorstone Cheese". James Martin kindly explains that Dorstone is a cheese he "came across once at a farmer's market", so the chances of me getting my hands on it in Lewisham are predictably low, but he adds that any "firm goat's cheese" will suffice - "even a French Crottin." (No, me either.) In any case, I expect the local Sainsbury's to only stock the soft and spreadable variety, so I'm pleasantly surprised when it yields a firm block of St Helen's Farm that appears ideal for the job at hand. Hurrah! 

The making: The courgettes are topped, tailed and sliced lengthways. Next they're oiled, laid on a baking tray and popped in the oven until browning slightly, whereupon they're removed and left on the side to cool.

A drained jar of sunblush tomatoes, the chopped shallots, a couple of cloves of garlic and half a dozen large basil leaves (torn) are mixed in a bowl and seasoned. The baked courgettes are then added. (This is where the first bit of confusion sets in: at no point does the recipe ask me to chop the courgettes into smaller pieces than the long lengthways strips that went into the oven, but the image accompanying the recipe and basic logic both suggest that they need to be sliced crossways too, so that's what I do.)

The goat's cheese is crumbled over the top of this mixture (the crumbling process requires a bit of pre-slicing too, or I'd be there all night), then the whole lot is tipped into an ovenproof dish.

Next, the pastry is rolled out a bit thinner so that it's 2cm wider than the dish all round. The edges of the dish are brushed with beaten egg, then the pastry is laid on top and pressed down onto the rim. The excess pastry is "trimmed away" and is presumably meant to be discarded, but again there's a disconnect between the text and the accompanying picture, in which the leftover pastry has clearly been shaped into a flower-like formation that adorns the middle of the pie. My kitchen skillz don't quite stretch that far (although, in retrospect, I could have used one of my animal-shaped cookie cutters - no elephants though), so I make do with a rudimentary five-pointed star.

The top of the pie is comprehensively brushed with the rest of the beaten egg, then into the oven it goes:

Arty angle betrays urgent need for oven cleaning

And out of the oven it comes:

Overhead view betrays historic kitchen surface charring incident

You'll have noticed a certain degree of... let's call it "egg pooling" on the surface of the finished pie. (That's what you get when the content of the pie is lumpy rather than saucy.) It is set and solid, but not quite as much as it ought to be, and it's not especially pleasing on the eye. A few minutes longer in the oven would have fixed that, but then the edges would have been burnt, so you know, it's undercooked swings and carcinogenic roundabouts.

The eating: Hey, it's not bad! I know that's probably to be expected considering I like all of the ingredients, and I might have expected the chunks of goat's cheese to have melted a bit more than they have, but their mild yet robust flavour is a great accompaniment to the olive oil antipasti vibe of the vegetables, and the basil is a tangible enough presence to merit its status in the recipe name without ever threatening to overwhelm.

Since we're doing this as an evening meal, I serve the pie with some side veg that are also selected largely at random (tarragon carrots and oven-roasted asparagus, for the record).

Contents: Incoherent.

While far from an error, this mishmash of flavours ends up detracting from the inherent pie-ness of the pie. This becomes apparent when we go back for the inevitable seconds - it's much better on its own, which leads me to believe that the filling would be more successful if deployed in individual tarts (with actual bases ffs) and served at room temperature in a lunch context.

Still, it's a pretty successful kitchen experience all round. Relatively simple preparation (partly because it's not a proper pie, obviously) yields a satisfying outcome and a hearty bit of vegetarian fare - even if the recipe does require some reading between the lines and some outright leaps of faith. James Martin's promise to "make your home cooking easier" really shouldn't give him carte blanche to just leave stuff out altogether...

Eleven more weeks of this ridiculous project to go. How many more pies and pastry products do you reckon we'll encounter between now and the end of the year? (And could one of them be a dessert, please?)

One-word verdict: Paj.