Plate Expectations

I think you'll agree that both cooking and relationships can be emotionally absorbing. They consume time and effort, they cause excitement, nerves, pride ... and when it all goes wrong, they can cause great disappointment.

Greg and I decided to make a chicken pie. From scratch. For the first time.

Beginning with the pastry, Greg carefully weighed out the flour and butter, leaving me to do the messy bit described in the recipe as “rubbing in”. We then added water and stirred with a “cold knife”, which, I even observed at the time, is unlucky (“stir with a knife stir to strife” as my Grandma used to say) but we'd been told by many a TV cookery program that when it comes to baking, you had to follow a recipe strictly, so a knife was reluctantly used. We rolled the pastry into a ball, cling-filmed it and popped it into the fridge. Pastry done.

Now to make the filling, which we were more comfortable with. Chicken. Bacon. Leeks. Garlic. Flour. Stock. Bit of thyme. Done. We didn't have to follow a strict recipe as this wasn't baking. Now to assemble it all. The filling goes into the dish. Pastry on Top. Beautiful. In the oven it goes.

The pie came out looking wonderful. We had done some vegetables to go along side it that we hastily dished up, eager to be tucking in. All that was left to do was the gravy, something we weren’t doing from scratch. However, we would use the water we cooked the vegetables in to retain the nutrients. We spooned the last of the gravy granules into a glass jug and reheated the vegetable water to avoid it becoming congealed. There were fewer gravy granules than we would have liked, but it would certainly do; If I was sparing with the water, we'd have just enough, thick, meaty gravy to go with our pie. I poured the boiling water onto the granules. Greg finished dishing up the pie onto the plates. The smell had taken over the kitchen, causing our stomachs to rumble. We grabbed our plates, I brought the gravy, and we sat down to dinner. Greg went to sort out some music for us to listen to while we ate, calling out different options from the CD rack. I distractedly poured gravy over our dinners whilst trying to decide between Back to Black and Grace. “Its got to be Grace”. I looked down at our plates, expecting to see the creamy pie surrounded by, and soaking up, the glossy brown sauce...

Our wonderful pie was swimming in what looked like steaming, grey, dish water. I'd not been “sparing with the water” and our dinner, our beautiful pie, was ruined.