A Posh Pie - Potato, Camembert and Pancetta Pithivier

I am a bit of a sucker for a pie, to be honest. And though this has taken a bit of a French turn and the pie has become a pithivier, it does not matter; a tasty mixture encased in golden pastry will always be a winner.

When given the opportunity to cook with Tesco Cypriot New Potatoes, I thought about how I had eaten them in the past. They don't necessarily need much attention, simply steamed with a little butter and some parsley and they are glorious. But I was thinking about what they would go well with, and then thought about a salad I had had with new style potatoes when I was in Normandy. And then I got to thinking about pies again and I kind of came up with this.

So, to France and the reason I discovered the combination of potato and Camembert. I sat down at a little bistro, sipping a cold Chablis and after the perusal of the menu I decided on a warm potato salad, anticipating little potatoes, absorbing a tangy vinaigrette and a green salad. But the menu did not mention the slices of Camembert, which oozed pleasingly on the plate. The combination of potato and warm Camembert was sumptuous.

Fast forward to now. Once I resolved to recreate this delicious salad accompaniment as a pie, for the filling I resolved to gild the lily further by frying off some pancetta once I had boiled, cooled and sliced the potatoes. I also thought that the addition of some fresh thyme would make this even tastier. You could substitute the bacon for onions, for leeks. Maybe sub the Camembert for a piece of Brie. All would compliment the potatoes wonderfully. Wrapping the pastry around the filling is a bit fiddly. It would be a neater job to take two pieces of ready rolled pastry and seal them together around the filling, but whatever you decide to do, do not seal the pastry too tightly around the filling so that you get the ooze as you cut into the pithivier. The potatoes take on the flavours of the bacon and the thyme, and with a salad accompanying this, it makes a tasty satisfying evening meal.

Cypriot New Potatoes are available in Tesco stores right now, until the end of March.

Potato, Camembert and Pancetta Pithivier

Serves two, generously

Ingredients:

A Camembert

100g Tesco Cypriot New Potatoes

70g pancetta

Fresh thyme

1 pack of ready rolled puff pastry (2 would make a neater job but would result in quite a lot of leftover pastry, which could be used for another recipe)

1 egg, for egg wash.

Method:

Boil the potatoes in salted water until just cooked. Drain and leave to cool, then slice into rounds about 1/2 cm thick.

Fry off the pancetta in a little olive oil. Once cooked, leave to cool.

Pre-heat the oven to 190c

Take the Camembert and slice it across the middle.

Unroll the pastry and place it onto a work surface. I kept it on the greaseproof paper it came wrapped in.

Place one half of the Camembert on top of the pastry. Brush the surrounding pastry with some beaten egg.

Pile the sliced potato onto the Camembert. Scatter the pancetta over the potatoes and then add some fresh thyme leaves.

Place the top of the Camembert onto the potato/pancetta mixture. It will be precarious!

Bring the pastry up and over/around the Camembert, or if you are using two pieces of pastry, bring the edges together. Seal the edges as neatly and as firmly as possible, cutting off any surplus pastry. Brush the top with egg and season with sea salt and black pepper. Score the top, pithivier style and pierce the top to allow any steam to escape.

Carefully place the pastry onto a baking sheet and place in the middle of the oven. Cook for approximately 20 minutes, or until the pastry is golden and puffed up. The pastry will spread in the oven and there might be some oozing of the filling.

Leave to cool slightly, as the filling will be very hot! Serve with a salad.

I should coco! - Coconut and Lemon Curd Madeleines

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I’ll be honest, I’ve been slapping coconut oil on my face for as long as I can remember, and it is indeed as good a moisturiser and restorative as my previous moisturiser, if not better, which, when I discovered this, was brilliant and disappointing rolled into one. It's brilliant when I think on one hand of the money I now save by buying coconut oil and putting that on my dressing table instead of the (expensive) moisturiser that I had been sucked into buying by promises of eternal youth. My savings now go towards my not insubstantial collection of Kurt Geiger shoes, which is very pleasing, but the cloud that goes with this particular silver lining is my thinking of the copious amounts of money I had spent in the years gone by on 'posh' moisturiser which in turn led me to lament the ‘Kurt Geigers’ that could have been mine if I had been a bit more savvy. Life can be cruel.

But my recent discovery of cooking with coconut oil has been a revelation. A bit of reading around led me to discover that coconut oil had been the ‘go to’ oil for cooking and baking, before we discovered the horrors of hydrogenated, manufactured fats and indeed like many other naturally derived oils, coconut oil had long been a beauty/health staple too by those in the know. Win. Win. So, for no real logical explanation, I decided to celebrate my much improved knowledge by making madeleines.

Regular readers to this blog will know that I am a Francophile, pure and simple. That being the case, it is surprising that my madeleine pan, bought at Super U in a pretty Dordogne town one balmy summer when I was young, beautiful and carefree, before such pans were ever readily available here, has had about three airings in all the time I have owned it. Despite my lack of effort, madeleines are a cinch to make, as long as you are vigilant because like most ‘biscuity’ types, blink and they are burned.

Newly inspired, I decided to make coconut and lemon curd madeleines, which are loosely based on the idea of placing a dollop of something in the middle of the raw madeleine mix. I’d seen it done with Nutella, but with my coconut vibe, I thought that the sharp lemon tang would be a great foil to the mellow, nutty coconut. So, I set off to work, replacing the requisite amount of butter for VitaCoco coconut oil and adding about 50g of desiccated coconut, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon orange flower water (I was thinking citrus…) to a well-established madeleine recipe that I had cut out of a French cookery magazine in the dim and distant past. The result was, even though I say so myself, pretty damn good. It was a good thing that madeleines don’t really keep very well and need to be eaten within a few hours of baking. Marcel Proust used to dip his stale madeleines in his tea; Lola, Finn and Phill snaffled these before I had managed to put the kettle on. There can be no better recommendation in my mind.

And if you don’t like lemon curd, what about lime curd for a totally tropical vibe? Or a dollop of raspberry jam? Now, Coconut and raspberry: Let me just think about that for a moment. Or you could visit www.swearbyit.com for some more great recipes!

This recipe is an entry into the #swearbyit challenge with Vita Coco. Find more great coconut oil recipes and tips on using coconut oil at www.swearbyit.com

Coconut and Lemon Curd Madeleines

Makes approximately 18

Ingredients:

3 large eggs

130g caster sugar

1 tbsp honey

1tsp orange flower water (optional)

100g Vita Coco Coconut Oil, softened,( but cooled if you have melted it) plus a little more for greasing the tin.

50g desiccated coconut

150g plain flour

6g (a generous teaspoon) of dried yeast

A pinch of salt

About a quarter  to half of a jar of good quality lemon curd

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200c

Place the eggs and the sugar in a mixing bowl and beat until light and airy.

Add the honey and the orange flower water if using and mix well.

Add the coconut oil. If it is quite solid, mix it vigorously into the egg mixture until it disperses evenly.

Add the flour, the coconut, a pinch of salt and the yeast and mix until combined. Don’t overbeat. Personally I taste the mixture at this stage to see if I can discern the flavours, in this case, coconut. If it tastes a bit bland, add a little more salt, but be careful.

Grease the madeleine pan very well with the coconut oil. This is imperative as you want your madeleines to come out easily.

Place a heaped teaspoon of the mixture into each madeleine mould. Tap the pan down on the working top to encourage the mixture to settle into the mould.

Place a scant teaspoon of lemon curd onto the madeleine mixture.

Top the lemon curd with another generous teaspoon of the madeleine mixture. You may have to use the spoon to disperse the mixture evenly and it may all become a bit messy, but it will be okay.

Give the madeleines a final tap in the pan and then place them in the middle of the preheated oven. They might spread frighteningly and will look pretty awful initially but all will be fine. They should take about 8 – 10 minutes to bake and they should be a light golden brown with perhaps slightly browner ‘shell’ edges. Remove from the oven and when you can do so. If you have greased the pan well, the madeleines should come away from the moulds easily.

Trim the madeleines to their characteristic shell shape. It is likely that some of the mixture will have spread from the mould and therefore some trimming will be needed to neaten the madeleines up. I just think of all those sweet crispy bits and it pleases me enormously.

Eat warm, or whilst they are not quite cold. They will begin to become a little less light once they have been cold for a while, in which case, do what Proust did: make a pot of tea.