March comfort food

I'm not sure anyone really needs an excuse to seek out comfort food. But if an excuse is needed, this March (with its crummy weather and various other minor and not-so-minor afflictions and catastrophes) is as good as any. We've had great success with two comfort food recipes lately, so I thought I'd share.




The first was The Kitchn.com's Vegan Tofu and Vegetable Pot Pie. I'd never been on the site before, and they don't specialize in vegan cooking, but the recipe sounded good so we figured we'd give it a try. We ended up with a little more than the two twelve-ounce personal pot pies the recipe is supposed to produce - I got one extra mini pie for leftovers. That gave me a chance to reevaluate the flavours and textures after they'd had a day to sit. I wasn't too surprised to find that the pastry - so yummy and flaky! - was best fresh out of the oven. But the pie innards were even more tasty once they'd had a chance to meld. I'm definitely interested in trying this one again, but we've also made a special note to keep this pastry recipe on hand for other uses.

The second recipe, part of our gesture toward St. Patrick's day, was Post Punk Kitchen's Mushroom Stout Pie with Potato Biscuits.

We've been fans of theppk.com for a while so choosing this one was a no-brainer (especially with beer and potatoes in the name). As you can see by the photo above, I don't have a dutch oven, so we used the 'make stew in a pot and transfer to oven-safe dish' option, and it worked fine. It was useful to have two sets of hands putting this concoction together, but even our awesome teamwork skills didn't keep us from minor miscalculations. I was late adding the stout, but with no noticeable difference (the stew still thickened well, and it's hard to say if the flavour was affected at all). And HevyMetalAdam may have been a little over-enthusiastic with the pepper grinding - though the extra-peppery flavour didn't stick around for leftovers.

I can't remember what our Pot Pie soundtrack was. Maybe the new Hypocrisy? Or Amorphis? Stout Pie prep did NOT go well with Tombstone Highway but did work well with Wilt. For eating, I can attest that both recipes go down well with Heroes, season one.