Wednesday, December 30, 2009

not my mum's turkey pot pie

For Christmas dinner for 7, my sister-in-law gave me a brined free-range 14 lb turkey to cook. With all the trimmings, 4 side vegetables, two sauces, gravy, potatoes and 2 kinds of stuffing, there was a lot of turkey left over. I sent some home with my sister-in-law and we still have a giant bag of turkey in the freezer as well as some in the fridge that I’m making my favorite leftover recipe with (turkey sandwiches). So the other night I decided to get a bit creative with a pot pie recipe.

Usually I make it loosely based on my Mum’s way of doing it – cut up turkey mixed with sauteed onions, mushrooms and garlic, leftover vegetables and gravy as the base and here I have always deviated from my mum’s recipe – instead of her pastry topper, I do a mashed potato topper, so it is a turkey pot pie a la shepard!

This year I sautéed the onion, garlic and mushrooms and added the cut up turkey. Then I made a pesto cheese sauce using 2 oz butter, 2 oz flour, 1 c stock (turkey stock), 1 c milk, ½ c homemade basil pesto and about 1 ½ c grated cheddar and gruyere mixed. To this I added ½ head cauliflower and similar amount of broccoli that had been oven roasted. This mix went into the bottom of a casserole and then was topped with puff pastry. I tried to get fancy and make a leaf motif with the leftover pastry.
Baked for 25 minutes at 400 deg. Yum!

And as I was defrosting the puff pastry anyway, I made pesto and goat cheese puff pastry appys - roll out the puff pastry into a rectangle. Spread a thin layer of pesto over the pastry, add a layer of goat cheese over the pesto and roll up from each long side until you have two equal rolls meeting in the middle. Cut into ~10-12 pieces and place onto a baking sheet. Bake at 400 deg for about 10 minutes until lightly browned and puffy.

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