Timmy's Pies

Out & About

Like hibernating bears, this recent sunshine has awoken us from our wintery slumber and, after a quick stretch, we’ve been out and about in search of the salmon of success.

So, as well as over-extending metaphors, we’ve been springing up in all sorts of unexpected places.

 

First we set up a little pie ‘n’ mash stand in the basement of Weiden + Kennedy. We were invited – they were off on a Jack the Ripper tour and needed fueling up before hand. There were two brilliant things about this gig:

1. We got to pretend we ran our very own East End caf, and came over all Mockney as a result, and

2. We got to go on the Ripper walk afterwards, which had us quaking in our flip-flops, but in an informed way.

Orwight Daaaarlin, Paaaand a pie, apples and pairs, eels all up yer sleeves...

Then it was straight down to Dorset to the Sandbanks Boat Show. What a view! Not the toughest 3 days we’ve ever spent working. 

Boats, boats, boats.

More events coming up later in the summer, including the Glynde Food and English Wine Festival http://www.glyndefoodfestival.co.uk

A Jubilee Pie

What with us being a very British little pie company, we've gone and got all caught up in Jubilee fever and created a smashing pie befitting the occasion.

This little beauty is made with mixed Berkshire game (at this time of year, pigeon and rabbit), apricots and free-range pork in a cider jelly. We've even burnished her with edible gold and purple lustre decoration. Most importantly it’s designed to fit neatly into a cardigan pocket, ideal to be enjoyed out and about over the Jubilee weekend.

Photographed on tweed. Of course.

They're available exclusively at Harvey Nics, so if you're strolling through Knightsbridge, pop in and check 'em out. We'll get the recipe up for you next week...

Wild garlic and spring lamb Shepherd’s Pie.

The other week we were asked to develop a shepherd’s pie - not just any shepherd’s pie, but “the greatest shepherd’s pie EVER”. So no pressure then.

So we put on our pastry hats (we do actually have pastry hats) and had a good think. This was when we thought of wild garlic – we’d seen hordes of it packing out the verges of the lanes in Cornwall, it’s got a fantastically sweet, subtle garlic flavour that would go beautifully with spring lamb.

Wild garlic. Grrrrrr.

So here’s our recipe for wild garlic shepherd’s pie. This one comes in 3 parts: the meat, the sauce and veg., and the mash. We made ours with a shortcrust pastry base and a fluffy mash piped on top, which makes them great as individual portions. Feel free to leave out the shortcrust and make as a sharer in a ceramic dish. Makes enough for 8 lunch-sized pies (or for 4 to share).

Ben "Lightning" Christopherson, rolling the lamb in wild garlic leaves.

Ingredients:

500g lamb shoulder or neck

bunch of wild garlic, keep 10  leaves whole, finely chop the rest

bunch of rosemary, finely chopped

bunch of parsley, finely chopped

100g peas (of course)

100g diced carrot (into little cubes)

100g diced onion

500ml really good lamb stock (if you’ve got time, make yer own)

500ml white wine

1 tblspn tomato puree

400g Red Desiree or King Edward potatoes

50ml milk

50ml cream

100g butter + a knob for frying

1 egg yolk

sprinkle of nutmeg

salt to taste

600g shortcrust pastry

 

1. Slow roast the lamb. Preheat the oven to 140. Season the meat with a hefty pinch of salt, wrap in wild garlic leaves and place in a roasting dish. Roast for 4 hours until it’s falling apart. Let it cool and then shred it into chunks.
2. Put a deep frying pan on the hob and get it nice and hot. Drop in a lug of sunflower oil and knob of butter, and then fry off the diced onion until it starts to go golden.
3. Stir in the tomato puree, the diced carrot and the chopped rosemary. Fry for another 3-4 mins then add the white wine. Let this reduce by about a third before adding the lamb stock. Cook until the carrots are tender, and remove from the heat.
4. At this stage, add the peas, parsley and wild garlic and season to taste. Add the shredded lamb and allow to cool – this is your shepherd’s pie filling. It should have quite a bit of liquid, but shouldn’t be swimming. You can always adjust by either adding more wine or lamb stock, or by straining off some of the liquid and reducing in a pan.
5. The mash. Get a pot of salted water to boiling point on the hob. Peel and chop the potatoes into 2cm chunks and boil in the salted water until tender throughout At the same time, warm the milk and the cream in a pan with a sprinkle of nutmeg. Strain the potatoes until completely dry and pop back in the pot, along with the butter, the egg yolk and the cream/milk/nutmeg. Do the mashed potato. The egg yolk will stabilize the mash when it bakes.
6. If you’re making individual pies, roll out the pastry to line your pie cases. About 4mm thickness will do, and leave a lip standing proud of the case. Fill 2/3 with the lamb mix, and top with mash – it looks great if you can get hold of a piping bag with a star nozzle, if not – spoon away.
7. Bake at 180 for 40 mins if using pastry, 30 mins if not. Serve piping hot and in a hedgerow.

The finished product - individual shepherd's pies (with shortcrust pastry base)

A Spring Break in Kernow

Last weekend we packed our speedos and our wellingtons, fired up the pie-mobile and took a trundle to the banks of the Helford River in Cornwall. Spring had definitely sprong in the South West, and the hedgerows were totally going off, buzzing with beasties.  

In between some hefty April showers we managed to get up to loads of mischief. Mischief in wellingtons, which is the best sort of mischief.

We happened across the Porthleven food and music festival. It turns out Anthony Worral Thompson was on day release and doing a few cooking demonstrations, and the place was packed with some corking produce. Particularly of note was Helford River cyder and the spice blends from Nature Kitchen. Also, keep your eyes peeled for Helford White cheese, it’s fantastic and it’s gonna be the next big thing. Oh we also had a couple of Skinner’s. Apparently it's what the Cornish drink.

3 of the best. Those Lizard ales were fantastic but the nettle beer was a total find – it tastes like a hearty rumble in a grassy verge, only alcoholic.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think were ever actually entirely sober… Note the Fisherman's Knit, very S/S 2012.

Welsh Tapas Pie: The making of…

So we painted ourselves into a bit of a corner with our foolish pie fillings competition, but we’re pie-men of our word. And thus we found ourselves making a pie from pickled eggs, pickled onions and a retro crisp selection; the principal components of Welsh Tapas (thank you, Jo Cresswell). Makes enough for 3 lunch-sized pies (although why anyone would want to make more than 1…)

15p for Space Raiders? We remember when they were 6p...

Ingredients:

3 pickled eggs

3 large pickled onions

2 packets pickled onion flavour “Space Raiders” crisps

1 packet smokey bacon flavour “Pom Bear” crisps

2 eggs

100ml milk

50ml single cream

Handful of chopped parsley

Pinch of salt and pepper

300g shortcrust pastry

1. Make a quiche-type base by beating together the eggs, milk and cream. Add the parsley, salt and pepper. Dice up the pickled onions and crush up the Pom Bears and fold this in.
2. Line a 3½ “ pie tin with sortcrust pastry. Carefully place a whole pickled egg in the center. Fill around this with the egg, onion mix. Crumble the space raiders on top and lid with pastry.
3. Decorate, glaze with egg or milk and bake at 180 for 40 mins, or until the pastry is golden.
4. Allow to cool, take a day trip to Newport and enjoy.

A fantastic pickled egg cross-section.

Now that's a happy winner.

And for the runner up: a voucher for 4 pies, redeemable at the Timmy's Pies Saturday market stall. We actually baked the voucher, but it was too fragile to send to Holland so we took a picture, printed it out and laminated it instead. We ate the actual pastry voucher. It tasted good.

A Winning Welsh pie.

We held a pie competition the other week, all in the name of British Pie Week.

We had some pretty punchy entries, and quite a few we’re going to have to follow up on.

They ranged from the good: parsnip & popcorn pie, rabbit and crayfish stargazey pie

Through ugly: labrador

To the down-right bad: scampi fries, honey-glazed ham and lucozade

We've also had illegal: pot noodles and pot pie

and alliteration: pigeon, pomegranate & parsnip

 

But the overall winner was Jo Creswell with her Welsh Tapas pie of pickled eggs, picked onions, and a selection of crisps.

And the runner up was Kittus (on twitter), a pork-pie starved Brit in Holland who wanted a pork pie FILLED WITH PORK PIES, to be called “A-pork-alypse Now”

Stay tuned for the making of the Welsh Tapas pie.

British Pie Week Competition

It’s British Pie week this week (5^th-11^th March). And we’re a British pie company. This rather simple train of thought has led us to conclude that we should do something to mark the event. But what? Someone’s already tried to shoot pies at France, and we can’t afford a blimp. So we’ve come up with a competition.

Send us suggestions for the most ludicrous, delightfully daft pie filling you can imagine. The one that makes us laugh the most WE WILL BAKE INTO A PIE AND SEND TO YOU!

That's right. A bespoke nonsense-filled pie. Delivered right to your door.

For example, our Northern friend Andy, in an idle moment of flippantry, let slip that he’d always wanted a steak, Bovril and Monster-Munch pie (what with him growing up in Barrow in the 90’s). So we made him one. Our friend James wanted a toothpaste and HB pencil pie. You get the idea.

Tweet, Facebook, or email us by midnight Thursday 8^th March, and we could be turning your outlandish dreams into pie-reality.

Please note: We can’t get hold of any unicorn, leprechaun, dodo or dragon (we have tried). Nor will we use any endangered animals, so panda pie is out. Other than that, go for yer lives.

A Shortcrust Valentine's

A pastry expression of love. 

A Winter Stewp

We were given the most glorious January King cabbage after the market the other week. It was deep purple-green and about the size of a mountain lion. We loved that cabbage. We decided that if we were going to cook it, and not just admire it until it went mouldy, we had to do it justice.

We went for a stewp – half way between and stew and a soup – of ham hock, cider, green lentils and, of course, cabbage. Here’s the recipe – we know it’s not a pie, but this is a cracking stewp, and what with the snow outside and cabbages in season, the timing’s spot on.

Loadsa snow in Hyde Park

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1.5kg ham hock, smoked or un-smoked depending on preference

2 onions, one quartered, one diced

4 sticks of celery

3 bay leaves

½ bunch parsley

½ bunch thyme

a handful of peppercorns

1 pint cider

5 cloves garlic

1 knob of butter

lug of olive oil

200g green lentils

1 fancy cabbage

 

1. In a pot, cover the ham hock in cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 3 mins. Discard the water and wash the ham – otherwise your stewp will be too salty.

 

2. Pour in the cider and top up with cold water to cover. Add the bay leaves, peppercorns, two sticks of celery and the quartered onion. Take just the stalks off the parsley, bash the thyme sprigs with the blunt edge of a knife and add both to the pot. Bring back to the boil, then simmer for 2 hours, or until the ham falls off the bone.

 

3. Meanwhile dice the second onion, the garlic, and the rest of the celery, then shred the cabbage. When the ham is done, pop it on a chopping board. Pass the liquor through a sieve into a jug and keep to one side.

 

4. Rinse out the pot, get it back on a high heat and fry up the onion in the butter and olive oil. When soft but not brown, add the garlic and celery for a further 3 mins.

 

5. Add about 2 pints of liquor and the lentils. Chop up the  parsley leaves and add them too. Bring to the boil and simmer for 35 mins. While this is going, pull the pork off the bone and add it as and when. After 35 mins, pop in the cabbage and cook for a further 10 mins, topping up with liquor if required.

6. Eat between snowball fights. Or after a really cold day at the market.

More warming than wearing every item of clothing you own.

Geronimo!

We’ve only gone and got our little pies into a cracking London pub co. As of today, our corking shortcrust beauties will be gracing the bar tops and menus of six topping Geronimo pubs across the city, with more to come. Totes amaze, as the kids say.

You can get four of our finest flavours:

*Venison, stout and prune

*Chicken, leek and tarragon

*Braised beef and red wine

*Pork and apple

And you’ll find ‘em in:

The Kings Arms, 190 Fulham Road, SW10 9PN

 

The Betjeman Arms, St. Pancras International Station, N1C 4QL

The Bull, Westfield, W12 7SL

 

The Curtains Up, Comeragh Road, W14 9HR

 

The Phoenix, Palace St, Victoria, SW1E 5JA

 

And The Kings Head, Winchmore Hill, N21 1BB

 

Pictures tea-leafed from the Geronimo interweb page ( http://www.geronimo-inns.co.uk ). To avoid confusion, we'd like to point out that the Betjeman Arms at St Pancras is not actually made of lego.

To end, here's a little song (Ben 2012 ©)

Don’t be fooled by the pubs that we got/ we still, we still Timmy’s from the block/ used to have a little now we got a few more/ but never fear were still on minimum wage….