My Weekend Food Challenge -can you help

memorygirl

Tipping it down - lovely horizontal rain up here. Decided to quit work early and spend the rest of the day getting organised to do my own weekend food challenge.

I'd like to fill up the freezer with as many meals as possible from my storecupboard ingredients - its about 16 weeks before Xmas so if I could make 32 meals that would be 2 meals per week I wouldn't have to budget for and could divert the funds to paying of my CC. Don't worry this Crimbo will be cash only.

DS loves things in pastry - so heres my first question.

If I buy some puff pastry and fill it with the following kind of fillings can I freeze the pasties in their uncooked state (frozen pastry always seems so soggy)

I'd like to do:

Feta, olive and spinach
Sausage and potato
new potato, cheese and onion
mince and onion (do I use cooked or uncooked mince for this one)
Corn beef hash
potato and pea curry
cauliflower, cheese and corn


Any other suggestions for pastie fillings - I'd really love your help.

I'll fill you in as I go with what I manage to conjour up out of the storecupboard. Wish me luck

Memorygirl

inkie

What a great selection - I really like the sound of feta olive and spinach. But what about:

chilli (mince, chilli beans etc)
sweet and sour chicken
spicy sausage and onion (with a salsa sauce in it)
chargrilled vegetables
sausage and baked beans

jcr16

how about chicken , mushroom and cheese. yummy yum yum.

what a really good idea, i could do with saving a bit of money each week for xmas.

moggins

That's a great idea. You can only freeze them uncooked if the pastry hasn't already been frozen though, if you're using frozen pastry then they have to be cooked before being frozen again.

I wish I was home more this weekend to do this.

Snow_Angel

I'm from Cornwall and, believe me, although there are traditional pasties, you really can put anything in them. Me and my boyfriend went to a different pastie shop than usual last week and he had an English Breakfast pastie (bacon, sausage, egg, beans and tomato). I had a Thai salmon one last year! Generally I like just plain veg or cheese and onion. You could also do sweet ones - apple and blackberry (you could pick your own!). Traditionally pasties had 2 halves, split down the middle with extra pastry - one half with steak and veg, the other half with jam for dessert!

moggins

I'll second that and I'm not even from Cornwall and if I remember rightly that thick twisty crust bit was for using as a handle and then throwing away because it would be black from the miners hands.

Snow_Angel

moggins wrote:

I'll second that and I'm not even from Cornwall and if I remember rightly that thick twisty crust bit was for using as a handle and then throwing away because it would be black from the miners hands.

It's because they'd have had tin (poisonous!) on their hands, so yes they'd hold the pasties by the crust, eat the middle then throw the crust away.....:eek: Ironic, as that's everyone's favourite bit of pasties :rotfl: