I try and have the days off between Christmas and New Year, it gives me a chance to play and try some new things. For sometime now I have wanted to try making my own sausages and for Christmas I was given a sausage stuffer, several recipe books, and you can guess the rest. Pork was duly minced, allergy friendly seasoning mixed, and amidst much hilarity the Norfolk sausage was born. If that’s the first attempt I cant wait until we have it sorted because it was tremendous.

However we did have a qty of minced, seasoned pork left over which gave me the opportunity to try something else I wanted to do for some time, make pork pies. Luckily in one of my new books there was a recipe for Water Crust pastry, vital for Pork Pies, and something else I have never tried, but as I always say “if I have a book it can be done” which is why the family are careful about the books they buy me.

It would appear unlike conventional pastry water crust pastry, a mixture of lard melted in boiling water combined with flour has to be worked hot, which makes it interesting. the end result as can be seen worked out well and the final result exceeded my expectation’s. I feel a whole new raft of Old Blokes Kitchen videos coming up, imagine a pork pie cooked in the wood fired oven. I’m salivating at the thought of it.

After 30+ years of marriage my dearly beloved continues to surprise me, todays revelation was that she had never eaten a Pork Pie, I suppose I shouldn’t been surprised as its a well known fact in our house held to be a universal truth that 90% of all pork pies are purchased and eaten by middle aged men. It so happens that I fall into that demographic and she doesn’t, which is why I like them, and she, until now didn’t have a view.The problem is now how do I tell my dearly beloved that no all Pork Pies are created equal, think of the disappointment when she discovers that mass produced shop pies don’t taste like these, and are in fact bland & soggy, depending upon the seasoning for any taste at all, which when you put it like that, makes me think the pleasure of a pork pie has just been taken away from me, unless of course its one of mine