Pie!

The basic premise for pastry can be used for most pastry based dishes. It doesn't have to be complicated. My son had a longing for a good old fashioned meat pie - mince and onion, no less. No problem! You can use this recipe for making pasties too. Add sugar to the pastry mix for fruit pies or for the base of lemon merrangue pie for example. The results were pretty impressive. A lovely, buttery pastry with a nice crumble to it, just like the 'real thing'. Needless to say, there were no leftovers!

Basic pastry mix

8 oz GF flour mix (I used Glutano)

4 oz of butter or margerine

1 egg

a pinch of sea salt (if making sweet pastry, replace this with 2 oz of caster sugar)

2-3 tablespoons of water

Rub the flour and butter together until they resemble fine bread crumbs. Add the sat or sugar and mix well.

Beat the egg and add tot he flour mix, mix in with a fork, add a little water until the dough comes together. At this point begin mixing and lightly kneading the dough together until it it is smooth and non sticky. You can add a little more flour as you knead it is necessary.

Chill in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Roll out and use as ordinary pastry. It may be a little more fragile that ordinary dough - but not too much, so handle accordingly.

For the filling, we used minced beef steak, fried with onions. I am not big on proportions, add as much meat and onion as you prefer. For the gravy I used Bisto gravy (beef flavour) Both the beef and chicken varieties are gluten free and absolutley delicious. I lightly seasoned the mince and onion before adding the gravy. It is best to let the meat and gravy mixture cool before you put them into the pastry shell. In fact, I prefer to put the meat into the pie dish and just have a top layer of pastry.

Brush with a little egg and milk glaze and cook for 30 minutes or so on Gas mark 4, 350 f, 180 c - until lightly golden.

Enjoy!