Easy Chicken and Ham Pasties

For these delicious pasties I used chicken, thick cut ham, onion and potatoes, with salt and pepper.

The sauce is one that I made earlier and used on some burgers. It was so tasty that I had to make it again.

The sauce was made as follows ;

1 can of chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt.

Mix together and simmer to reduce the volume by half.

Cool.

In a frying pan simmer

1 large chopped onion

2 cloves chopped garlic

3 sticks chopped celery

A pinch of salt

Cook until all ingredients are softened

Cool down.

Put the sauce and the onion/celery mixture in a blender and blitz them into a smooth paste.

Put this mix back on the heat and add a dessert spoon of worcester sauce, a dessert spoon of chilli sauce and simmer until reduced to a thick paste.

The pasty filling:

Chop the chicken and ham into chunks.

Fry the onion to caramelise it.

Boil three potatoes until half cooked.

Place all these ingredients into a casserole dish.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Now add the sauce you made.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C or gas mark 6. Place the casserole in the top of the oven and cook for an hour or until the chicken is falling apart.

Remove from the oven and cool. When cold, break the mixture down with a fork so that it is fairly chunky.

The pastry

250 grams of self raising flour

125 grams of cooking fat

a teaspoon of salt

a small amount of cold water.

Add the salt to the flour and mix. Then cut up the cooking fat into cubes and rub it into the flour. When it becomes like crumb, slowly add a little water and mix it. When the pastry starts to form into a ball, flatten it, put it in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. Leave it for a couple of hours, more is better.

Roll out the pastry until nice and thin.

Mark around a small plate to form a circle. I use this crinkly pastry press that I bought some years ago for a couple of pounds. It makes a nice size pasty.

Put a tablespoon of filling in the centre of the pastry circle. Wet the edges with milk and fold it over to form a half moon. Or you could do as I did with one of them, and bring both sides of the circle up and join them at the top to form a form a crust. Paint them all over with either milk or beaten egg and place on a tray in the centre of the oven and bake at 220C Gas mark 7 for twelve minutes. Then take them out, turn the tray around so that the front now becomes the back and cook for another seven minutes. Your oven will be different to mine so you'll know if you need to turn them or not. In all, they need about 20 minutes in mine.

Allow to cool before eating.