Pukka Pie Served with Baked Beans and Mashed Potatoes

Pukka served up my first portion of pie in British Pie week, with 1/4 of this gloriously tasty looking Pukka Pie, a Chicken & Gravy pie, intended as a single family serving, I’ll eat it over four separate days, but with varying side dishes.

I didn’t want to go shopping, just to show you how innovative I am with my side dishes, so you get to see a selection of easy to find and easy to buy serving suggestions.

This quarter of a pie is easily cooked in my mini oven, the small toaster oven needs no pre-heating and so a single portion of pie was cooked from chilled in half the cooking time the box suggested, taking only 20 minutes. I didn’t have cooking instructions for a 1/4 of a pie in a toaster oven, so had to make it up – at first I had the top and bottom elements on for 10 minutes, but, as you can see, that’s a little too long as the top starts to burn.

Cooking a Pie in a Toaster Oven.

Having burnt the top of the first quarter, here are the cooking instructions for cooking a pie in a toaster oven with top and bottom elements:

1. Put the pie into the oven on a baking tray or ovenproof dish.
2. Turn on the top and bottom elements for just 5 minutes
3. Turn the top element off and cook the pie for a further 15 minutes with just the bottom oven element on.

The top element in a toaster oven is intended as a grill – it’s useful to use to pre-heat the oven and “get things going”, but you have to be careful the first time you cook something that the top doesn’t burn.

I’ll typically start any toaster oven cooking session by having the top and bottom elements on together, to get the mini oven up to temperature as quickly as possible, then I’ll turn off the top element to continue cooking.

• The baked beans are lower salt and lower sugar baked beans – just a supermarket own brand and these were re-heated in the microwave.
• I chose instant mash to go with this – instant mash keeps for months in the cupboard and is 99% potato, it’s a cupboard staple for me as it doesn’t go off, so I always have it in stock.

Day one of British Pie Week done and dusted….

10 a Day

Well, this was a big fat fail really wasn’t it.  The beans count as one portion towards 10 a day.  To increase that I’d have to either choose a vegetable pie, or add more vegetables onto the plate.

C’est la vie.

Menu Cost: 

I bought this pie when it was a special promotional price of £2, so this portion was just 50p.  The baked beans are 10p and the instant potato with a knob of butter works out at about 5p.  So the meal cost here was 65p.  This is a filling meal and was my main meal for the day.