Who ate all the pies?

Perhaps I am a great big Yorkshire cliche, but I love pies - - meat and potato pies, apple pies, cherry pies, chicken pies, pork pies - - I don't care what kind. However, I am not a great pastry chef - - my hands seem to change temperature as soon as I think about making the stuff. So something I love but rarely make, seemed a good place to start making a dent in my 111 dishes. The spirit of this challenge is to try cooking all types of things, not just those that I think I will be good at, so I picked this recipe from 'Something for the Weekend' and off I went. Although the recipe seems to suggest that you should make the pastry and then the filling, do it the other way around, all I know about hot water crust pastry, is that it likes to be kept hot, so best have everything ready to go for when it's done! The filling just involved mixing, so I won't dwell on that, but the pastry was tough do to. Every time I picked a piece up it would slowly open before disintegrating, and I was soon murmuring by very best Anglo Saxon words. Perhaps it would have been easier to handle if I had used the recommended lard, instead of vegetable fat, but I couldn't bear the idea of eating it so soon after Christmas and its excesses. I also made the school girl mistake of not quite leaving enough pastry for the lid, so there were one or two unwanted ventilation holes. The pie was not pretty, but then again, good pies are not best known for their looks.Taste test wise, this was a winner - - you can't really go too wrong with chicken, bacon and sausage in pastry, although I reckon serve it hot, not cold as suggested, on a cold day there is nothing so comforting as warm pastry.

In my enthusiasm for getting this task started, I decided to knock off two recipes in one night and have a crack at mayonnaise to make a potato salad as an accompaniment to go with the pie. I used Marguerite Patten's recipe from her book 'A Century of British Cooking', a book which never normally fails me. And it didn't this time. I have no objections whatsoever to eating raw eggs in dishes, but when I do, I make sure they're ones that are fresh, and I always use free range ones - - you can taste the difference, as well as being safe in the knowledge that the hens have a happier time of it. I am obviously very sheltered, and had never tasted fresh mayonnaise before. It's such a different substance to the white stuff you get in a jar (not that I have objections to that, it's delicious). But this was yellow and creamy and sharp enough to offset the stodge of the pie and potatoes. It was however, slightly runnier than required, Patten, helpfully, doesn't tell you how much oil, merely saying 'up to 300ml', and as a first timer, I wasn't sure when to stop.

If I've learnt anything from my endeavours today, it's not to panic when things don't quite go to plan (this coming from a girl who once dismayed her boyfriend by throwing out a batch of cupcakes that didn't rise properly), ok, so, the mayonnaise was runny, and the pastry had potholes, but it was still a more than acceptable supper, and I have 109 recipes to go.