Baked bean and kangaroo pie

This is what I did last night, and apart from learning that I need - well, want - to get some little pie dishes, I found it was a meal in itself. Now you might think it's a bit weird to put something as exotic as kangaroo steak with baked beans, but I would've thought it was a lot more weird to find/buy something equally exotic especially to go with it, rather than using what I already had in the kitchen. I mean to say, I didn't get kangaroo meat to "be exotic" but because it's what happens to be available locally and affordably. Like the Lymn Bank cracked black pepper cheese you see here next to it, which has become a firm favourite in our house.

Anyway, I started out by making the pastry. I did an apple pie last week that was a full-fat affair, so I thought I'd best skimp on the fat in the pastry this time and just used 75g of Lincolnshire Poacher butter to 300g of Sibsey Trader Mill flour. I had planned to do half and half wheat and maize flour, but I forgot, so it was just wheat.

If you don't know how to make pastry, it's the age old technique of rubbing the butter into the flour until it goes breadcrumb-like and then adding in whatever you want depending what you're using the pastry for. For apple pie, jam tarts and general sweet stuff I shake in some sugar (about 3tbsp for this amount) but for this meat pie I added salt, pepper and a tablespoon of dried oregano. Then I added a beaten egg and a splash of milk, and gathered it all into a ball, adding more milk as needed to make it rollable. Then divide it between the two dishes:

At this point I probably should've put cling-film or something over them, because when I came to actually roll it out, the outsides of the balls had started to go a bit crusty. But it was alright - it still worked :)

What I actually did was leave the pastry aside like that while I fried up some onions and mushrooms in a bit of rapeseed oil. I tend to do this sort of thing on a low heat lately, as it stops the onions burning while I cut up the meat. After they'd gone soft I put the meat in and just left it cooking in the residual heat from the turned-off electric cooker ring while I rolled out the pastry.

I broke a little bit off each ball to keep by for the top, rolled it out as thin as I dared without it breaking, then made it fit into the little bowls here however I could. Some stretching and cutting was involved, but I got there...

Then in went the meat, onion and mushrooms. And look, there's that magically appearing broccoli again :)

Actually, before I started cooking the onions I'd boiled the kettle and poured hot water over the chopped broccoli and just left it in a pan with the lid on to soften, so it was ready to go in the pie by this time without having to turn a ring on. As I've only got one cooker ring that heats up in less than oh, say, an ice age or two, I do stuff like this a lot. Then I tipped half a can of beans on top:

And put some of that aforementioned cheese in there, before closing it all with the lid and brushing the top with some beaten egg.

Half an hour at 180°C later, it came out of the oven all golden and lovely, and we'd already started tucking in when I remembered I was supposed to get a photo!

And there you go! One baked bean and kangaroo pie from scratch to table in about 20 minutes prep time, 30 mins cooking time. Total food miles probably less than 50, and total cost of about £2.50 per pie :)