A Christmas Feast

I was reading through my November issue of the BBC Good Food magazine which had arrived weeks before November.  Given that it was possibly still the end of September when I was doing this, I hadn't really been thinking about Christmas.  However, my eye was caught by this pretty little Christmas pie.  I like to have some festive and pretty vegetarian things for Freyja.  Things that aren't nut roast or quorn rolls

In the intervening weeks, I have pondered many things that we might have for the Christmas Feast, but have kept coming back to the pretty little Christmas pies. No reason why they absolutely have to be vegetarian. Although one of them most certainly will be.

So I made up a beef and ale stew in my slow cooker on Christmas Eve. I diced the braising steak into very small pieces and fried it up. I added some finely chopped fried onions and a can of Ruddles County ale and set  the slow cooker going for 10 hours.

I also took some diced butternut squash, some finely chopped leeks, a little garlic and some tarragon and simmered them together in some white wine (which entirely fortuitously was suitable for vegetarians) until they were all nice and soft. Then I stirred through a very generous dollop of Philadelphia cheese and a handful of crushed hazelnuts.

On Christmas Day  I lined some individual foil muffin cases with a home made short crust pastry (this was much, much harder than I expected it to be!!) and filled one with the squash mixture and the rest with the beef and ale filling. Then I topped the pies with a supermarket puff pastry lid, each of which had had a star shape cut out of it.  I made up a load of puff pastry stars while  I was about it.  They went into a moderate oven for about half an hour

We all had a bowl of butternut squash soup that Freyja had made while we were waiting.

When the pies were very nearly ready I warmed through some red currants and some white currants. Then I topped the pies with pastry stars, the warm currants and a roasted sage leaf each.  They ere very pretty pies.  And extremely delicious.  And Freyja was absolutely delighted that her Christmas meal looked exactly the same as everyone else's.  The contents of the pie might have been different - but her plate looked exactly the same as mine.  And not a quorn roll in sight!!

We finished up with chocolate mousse and apple crumble cake.  So it was not by any means a traditional Christmas Feast - but it was extremely tasty, very festive and enjoyed by all

(The spell checker on my computer keeps trying to change "quorn" into "quern".  Not sure anyone would enjoy eating a quern roll!!!)