
I promised you two pies, and I won’t disappoint. Unless you are a vegetarian or a vegan. But I shall provide a vegetarian version for one of them! I am sorry, but I do just love meat.
The first pie: Pheasant, leek and bacon
I know that usually a food will be called “one or two ingredient pie, with other main tastes involved secretly” but I am having none of that nonsense. This pie also features cheese, but not noticably.

You see, I had the meat of a medium-large pheasant in the freezer. And I also had some pastry left over from the pork pie that I introduced this club with. These two situations came together!
ingredients
Loose base pan such as this
Meat of one pheasant (chicken, pigeon, etc?)
One medium leek
approx 8 rashers of streaky bacon
small lump of gruyere cheese. I can’t remember exactly how much I used, so you should improvise. “Just enough to mix in with the cooked leeks without overwhelming the picture”.
pastry (use wholegrain flour with seeds)
salt and pepper
thyme
bay leaf
30z water
olive oil
Slice your meat into manageable pieces; about 3×2 inches. Season with salt and pepper on both sides. Heat 1tbsp oil in a frying pan, and once it’s hot enough to sizzle as the meat is moved in add the meat. Once 3-4mm of the bottom side of your meat is white (cooked), turn the pieces over. You want to seal the meat on all sides, so it’s lightly browned but not cooked all the way through.
Move your meat to a separate dish, add a little more oil if needed, and place your bacon into the pan. Fry the bacon until it’s as rigid and browned as you favour; for me it’s dark and solid. Move the bacon into another dish again.
Turn down the heat, add oil again if needed, and chop and add your leeks. You need a medium-low heat because they need to soften, not fry. Once they’re silky (keep stirring), move them to a bowl and grate in your cheese. DO NOT WASH UP THE PAN YOU’VE DONE ALL YOUR FRYING IN. Turn the heat up to medium and add some of the 30z of water (your decision as to how much you use). Boil all the tasty bits off the bottom of your frying pan, basically. Put this gravy aside.
Roll out your pastry, and lay it into your pie dish. The method recommended by Lorraine Pascale in the pastry recipe link above works as well as she suggests! Now you need to cut your meat into bitesize chunks, and snap (or cut, if you like it floppy) your bacon into workable pieces. You need to layer the three different ingredients into the pie, pheasant/leek/bacon etc. When you reach the top add the gravy (just pour it in to the gaps) and close the pie by either beating up an egg and sticking your pastry lid to the pastry walls or by using milk to do the same. Glaze the top of the pie with your egg or your milk, and oven bake for forty-five minutes, give or take (180 on a British fan oven).
If you have leftover innards and leftover pastry, make pasties! If you have only leftover filling, mix it all together and eat it.
YUM YUM.

The second pie: Valentines pie!

Beetroot chilli with a middle layer of leek and feta. That’s basically it.
Ingredients:
Beetroot chilli
Two small leeks
100g feta
pastry, as above
You see, this is just a pie full of chilli. If you know how to make chilli, you know how to make this pie. Vegetarian chilli? Beef chilli? Pork mince chilli (which we used)? You do the leeks the same way as you did them for the recipe above, only you add crumbled feta instead of grated gruyere. What I would suggest is that you try adding brown sugar to your pastry recipe. That’s the only extra effort involved here.
Except for making the lid pretty!

It doesn’t stay together very well once sliced but who cares? Pies is for eating.