Broccoli and mushroom pie

When it comes to cooking veggies….my mind goes void….they seem so limiting. But since my man is a veggie person, I have to get more veggies into my cooking. Which is not such a bad thing…

And since during the week we’re both at work, an easy to pack, easy to eat, even cold, dish is a good idea.

Broccoli – that’s what I had in plan. That’s it. Just broccoli. The rest was void. Blank. I opened the fridge and took out some potential ingredients…A broccoli pie…ah..and I had some left over mushrooms since I had cooked the Kittel casserole with Mari…and some sour cream…butter…flour…eggs…just what I needed for a pie …

I started off with the pie filling which was going to cook for a while.

½ kilo broccoli (about 10 bouquets)

6 medium size mushrooms

1 medium onion

2 -3 cloves of garlic

spices- I used salt, pepper, oregano and curry

I washed the broccoli bouquets under a jet of cold water (yes, Mom, I know…I should’ve let them in a pot of cold, salted water to get all the residues out…but I didn’t have the patience) and then put it in a pot of boiling water and left it there for about 10 minutes- it didn’t need to be thoroughly boiled as it was going to get into the oven.

While the broccoli was cooking, I chopped the onion and the garlic and put them in a pan with hot olive oil. When the onions had turned glossy, I added in the medium chopped mushrooms. Then the spices went in.

While the veggies were doing their thing, I got started on the pie crust.

300 g flour

150 g butter

6-7 tablespoons of cold water

1 pinch of salt

Salt and flour in a bowl. Butter melted for about 1 minute in the microwave. Added butter to the flour and mixed everything together with my fingers until I had dough that looked and felt like wet sand.

I split the dough in 3 equal parts- 1 for the pie cover and 2 for the pie bottom crust. The pie pan was buttered and covered with bread crumbs. Over the breadcrumbs I put the dough and stretched it out to cover the bottom and the sides of the pan. Ideally I would have rolled the dough big enough to just lay it on the pie pan…but I never can do that…so I roll it as much as I can and then stretch it in the pan with my fingers.

I put the crust in the fridge as the dough had a lot of butter and I went back and dealt with the filling.

I took the mushrooms off the stove, drained the broccoli and took them out on the balcony to cool down- I needed them to be close to room temperature as I was going to add eggs and sour cream, and didn’t want everything to turn into a big omlette.

When they were cool enough I mixed the broccoli and mushrooms together in a bowl…

…and then added 3 eggs, well beaten together with 3 tablespoons of sour cream and poured everything in the pie crust. I saved a little beaten egg to brush over the pie crust at the end.

As the pie filling was quite liquid and I didn’t want it to prevent the crust from baking, before I added the filling I laid a coat of bread crumbs on the crust and then, on the top of the filling. The breadcrumbs were going to absorb some of the egg-sour cream mix.

I was telling you at the beginning of this post that for me the veggies are one of those things that are just good for you but tasteless…so I felt the need to enrich the taste of the pie…

I opened the fridge…I took a look around and got some salty cheese left over from the Kittel casserole, some blue cheese and Grana Padana I had recently bought (but any mix of cheeses that you like/ have would go). Chopped them at will and sprinkled them over the pie filling.

The pie “lid”…in my mind I was going to roll the 1/3 of dough I had saved…roll it round enough to cover the whole pie. It turned out that I didn’t have enough dough for that. So I reconfigured the plan. I cut out stripes of the rolled dough and made some sort of a grid on top of the pie. Brushed it with the saved beaten egg and off in the oven.