More Adventures in Student Cooking

Like I said, there would be lots of experimentation from that cookbook, and here is another: Cornish Pasties! I've had a nasty little craving for these not-so-little parcels of meat/vegetable goodness that just wouldn't go away, and I decided to try my hand at making them myself. I tried the 'Speedy Shortcrust Pastry' from the cookbook, and it unfortunately came out a bit hard and not quite as flaky as short crust should be, but I might attribute that to my use of olive oil margarine, as opposed to real butter. Butter really does make all the difference.

I made two, and saved one for later (apparently they freeze well too), filling them with a random assortment of stewing beef, swede, carrots, cauliflower, onion, just a little too much garlic, thyme, and potato. My favorite kind tend to involve just beef, gravy and ale, or a mushroom and chicken mix, but I had a lot of veggie ends lying around that looked in need of a home. 

Figured it had been a while since I posted any non-food pictures too, so here's one of the lovely ferris-wheel/fake London Eye that's been set-up in Nottingham's Market Square. Bloody expensive to go on it, so I just admire from afar. 

Also, thought I would share with you that pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie taste exactly the same. Who knew? I was recently watching I Robot with a friend and in it, Will Smith absolutely devours several sweet potato pies and I thought, huh, don't those look good. So I looked up a recipe and sure enough, it has very similar spices to pumpkin pie, and tastes just the same! I made 6 little baby ones, which I'm currently eating with some strange fake ice cream I found at Tesco called Worthenshaws Freedom, which was apparently on Dragon's Den TV Show.