I don’t know what it is about cooking and war movies lately. Seems like they go well together. So I cut up chicken and what not while watching Kubrick’s Vietnam war classic Full Metal Jacket. Yes, I partially did it to stem the potential trauma emanating from the film, but in many ways it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it was going to be, because so many of the film’s scenes have become too famous for its own good. Also a lot of Kubrick are set up to death before anything actually occurs and you could see it coming a mile away. But frying bacon and mushrooms definitely helped.

I made Nigella Lawson’s chicken and mushroom pie, another recipe that involves puff pastry - to get rid of the pastry left over from the tarte Tatin bit. After this, my puff pastry infatuation has got to rest a little bit before its next outing.

So this is the recipe almost verbatim from her website:

INGREDIENTS

3 rashers streaky bacon, cut or scissored into 2.5cm strips (I used smoked bacon ends)

1 teaspoon garlic oil (I did not use this, just regular olive oil)

125g chestnut mushrooms, sliced into 5mm pieces (I used baby cremini mushrooms)

250g chicken thigh fillets cut into 2.5cm pieces

25g flour

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme (I used bay leaves)

1 x 15ml tablespoon butter

300ml hot chicken stock

1 x 15ml tablespoon Marsala (I used Pinot Blanc)

1 x 375g (23 x 40cm) sheet all-butter ready-rolled puff pastry

Serving Size : Serves 2 (bigger/hungrier people than me)

METHOD

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. In a heavy-based frying pan, fry the bacon strips in the oil until beginning to crisp, then add the sliced mushrooms and soften them in the pan with the bacon.

2. Turn the chicken strips in the flour and thyme (you could toss them about in a freezer bag), and then melt the butter in the bacon-and-mushroom pan before adding the floury chicken and all the flour left in the bag. Stir around with the bacon and mushrooms until the chicken begins to colour.

3. Pour in the hot stock and Marsala, stirring to form a sauce, and let this bubble away for about 5 minutes.

4. Take two 300ml pie-pots (if yours are deeper, don’t worry, there will simply be more space between contents and puff pastry top) and make a pastry rim for each one – by this I mean an approx. 1cm strip curled around the top of each pot. Dampen the edges with a little water to make the pastry stick.

5. Cut a circle bigger than the top of each pie-pot for the lid, and then divide the chicken filling between the two pots.

6. Dampen the rim of the pastry again and then pop on the lid of each pie, sealing the edges with your fingers or the underneath of the prongs of a fork.

7. Cook the pies for about 20 minutes turning them around halfway through cooking. Once cooked, they should have puffed up magnificently.

I left it the filling in the cast iron skillet, because there were no pie-pots to be had. The pastry rim thing only partially worked. Without any ill effects to the final dish.

It tasted awesome when it was just done, but when I had it again for dinner it seemed a little bland. But perhaps a lifetime of intense Asian flavors had ruined me for mildly flavored things. I kinda liked Italian food in Italy because it was salty. 

Will I make it again? Maybe in the fall. Or winter. This seemed more like cold weather food.