Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Eggs and ham

I have just spent 40 minutes reading this rather elaborate recipe for gala pie on the Guardian site. Any picture of ham, eggs or pastry on my favourite UK news site will immediately distract me from the actual news.

It took me 40 minutes to read, because I spent 15 minutes doing a careful study of the instructions and the photos. Decided it was too elaborate - boiling pigs trotters, crimping pastry, etc. Probably not worth the effort.

Then spent 5 minutes gazing into space thinking about pork pie and scotch eggs.

Spent 10 minutes re-reading the recipe. It still looks elaborate but totally worthwhile.

Then spent 10 minutes googling butchers in NY who can supply pigs trotters. And trying to decide how to explain to TLOML that we need to buy a pastry crimper, funnel, pie dish, hand mincer and palette knife to equip our NY kitchen (I predict "sweetie, we're in New York, we don't need to cook! and we're moving back to London in 6 months" in response).

In case you're wondering, gala pie is a pork pie with eggs in it. Like a scotch egg in a pie, sort of. Party time!

I want to make this pie. Badly. I suspect the upshot will be:
 Time spent researching and shopping: 3 hours
 Time spent cooking: 2 hours
 Time spent eating: 20 minutes
And it doesn't put me off one little bit...

Some pictorial explanations for my American readership:
Gala pie. A porkpie with an egg in it.

Pork pie. A gala pie without the egg.


Scotch egg. Egg wrapped in sausagemeat and deepfried.
Party egg. Like a scotch egg but the egg is chopped. Then wrapped in sausagemeat and deepfried.

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