Didn’t work out, did it?…

I still had half a packet of minced beef left after cooking this dish earlier so I decided to make some pies…and I guess the easiest would be to come out with some cottage pies for which I would only need to make some mashed potatoes and use for the cover…

I just boiled some potatoes and removed the skin before adding some cheese…

…and mashing them…

…till the texture was fine enough for my liking. Normally, I would add some milk to make it creamier but for some reason or other, I decided not to that day and I did not add a bit of butter as well…for the simple reason that there wasn’t any in the house and I did not want to use our olive oil margarine instead as it would not have that same fragrance.

For the filling, I fried one Bombay onion, finely chopped, in a bit of oil before adding the beef, straw mushrooms (canned), sliced and daun sup (Chinese celery), chopped. I added some pepper…and thinking that I wanted a stronger beef flavour and a darker colour, I added a spoonful of Bovril. Now, THAT was a grave mistake! Anyway, once it  was cooked, I dished everything out and put the filling in the aluminium foil pie cups for baking…

I thought it tasted all right at the time.

Then I covered all of them with the mashed potatoes and used a fork to pierce holes to enable the air to escape when baking. Once ready…

…I placed all of them on a tray and put them in the oven to bake…

…till they had turned a nice golden colour.

The mashed potato cover was all right – very nicely done but the filling…

…did not taste quite right. I thought I could smell the Bovril while the pies were baking in the oven…and it turned out that it was so overpowering that it drowned out everything else – there was no trace of the taste of beef, no hint of the  celery nor the onion – just Bovril. In fact, it came across to me like one of those Chinese pastries with their meat filling cooked in dark soy sauce, lots of it.

Perhaps if I had cooked the beef for the filling the same way I had cooked half of it earlier, it would be a whole lot nicer. Oh yes, it was edible all right…and it did not taste too bad but I was disappointed that it did not turn out as nice as I was hoping it would.