The pie and the falafel

It used to be the case that I’d wear my ‘atin’ trousers whenever there was a big feast coming up at home. Then Covid came and went via lots of big feasts at home, with the result that my ‘atin’ trousers are the only ones that fit me anymore. The thing is, if I grow out of these, I’ll need new trousers – and new atin trousers. Bad times.

However, in a bid to combat the necessity for new atin trousers, I have resolved to have fewer of the big feasts at home, whilst including more of what is considered, good food.

You might say this is something of a New Year’s resolution, although at the same time, I’m not convinced that making commitments on December 31 when you’re full of vol-au-vents, cocktail sausages and IPA is realistic or even, long-term attainable.

Did you know that ‘vol-au-vent’ means ‘fly on the wind’ in French? Now you do.

And did you know that if you eat one dozen M&S vol-au-vents (a mixture of maple cured bacon and mushroom, salmon and cream cheese and tomato and mozzarella) in the space of an hour and a half that you’re left with international standard heartburn. It’s true.

It would not have helped that the aforementioned dozen pastries were consumed at the tail-end of three bottles of Scraggy Bay, and a half’un of Bowmore Whiskey.

Did you know, too, that if you sit up until midnight on Halloween night and brush your hair with your left hand in front of the mirror saying the ‘Hail Mary’ backwards, that the Devil will appear behind your shoulder and hand you a Rustlers Burger and a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20? It’s true.

He’ll even stick the burger in the microwave for you if you agree to farming out an acre of your immortal soul that he might graze his flock of demons thereupon and forever-after.

Actually, I made that last one up; although, if aul Beelzebub is eating or drinking anything, I’d say it’s those two singular affronts to gastronomy.

By the time you’re reading this, dear gastronaut, we’ll be well into the New Year, and perhaps any lingering notions about ‘good food’ will already have been consigned to the annals of familial history.

Perhaps you, too, will have already cracked, and have gone hankering for the Rustlers Burgers and bottles of luminous though questionable alcohol.

Or, perhaps, I’m doing you an injustice by suggesting such frippery.

Personally, I know two things for sure: i). I’m not eating another bite of turkey until next December and ii). Falafel is my new best friend.

It’s ironic that I’m swearing myself off the turkey, seeing as how this year’s bird was one of the best ever.

A free-range bronze which was gifted by a friend, it was roasted in the traditional fashion for the main feast on Christmas Day, and with all the traditional trimmings. However, it was on Boxing Day that the craic really started.

Determined not to lose a single mote of magical bronze taste, I dismantled and then cooked up the carcass to make a stock. This stock I then used as lubrication for a buttery sauce, which itself bound the left-over turkey meat and ham in a pie.

Just as I was about to reach for the all-butter puff pastry which I had cunningly bought on Christmas Eve, I remembered I am a clown, and I had stupidly forgot to buy said pie completion. Not to be deterred however, I embarked on a mission to make all-butter puff pastry at home – a virginal mission for yours truly.

And so it came to pass that on Boxing Day, I completed the pastry mission, topped the pie and then sat down to the magnificent feast you can see in one of the photos. Not to put too fine a point on things, but it was one of the finest meals of my life, only let down by the presence of a sad leftover roast potato from the day before. Whether this pie’s magnificence was the deep and flavourful turkey stock, the exemplary free-range bronze meat or indeed, the crispy, risen and all-butter, home-made puff pastry, I cannot say. Perhaps it was a combination of all of these things and more.

And so as I sit here with my atin trousers fit to bust, and with the echo of international standard heartburn still rumbling around in my guts, I am swearing myself off all rich food for at least 11 months. The Boxing Day pie was a thing of wonder which I won’t forget in a hurry.

And, as the days and weeks and months tick by, I’ll make another appointment with that pie on December 26 2023.

All-butter everythings and succulents meats have hereby been replaced with vegetables and falafel (as in the other picture).

For the good of my continuing gut health, my currrent atin trousers and even for the as yet unsullied acres of my immortal soul, falafel is my new best friend.