Lancashire leek and cheese pie, tots and hot ketchup

Leek and onion pie in  a grainy mustard casing

I have decided to revive this blog as I love cooking but forget too easily what I have made.  Also, now that I am on the Cabinet and have gone half-time at work, my life seems to have gotten even busier and I rely on a few old staple recipes to see me through - most of which involve copious amounts of cheese.  They are thought up on the drive home from County with only speed in mind.

It took a while to track down this blog as I couldn't remember what I had called it or what email address it was tethered to.  In the process I found a two post blog that I had started even earlier!

Looking back three plus years ago, I was interested to see that I had talked about hives which at the time I linked to the house renovations I was doing and the loss of my mother.  I now know that the hives were the symptom of peri-menopause and worse things to come, but more of that later.....

Lancashire cheese volcano.  Though I am veggie mainly I do eat cheese with rennet which is not purist...sorry!

So at the plot we have an abundance of leeks and a few weeks ago, on a trip back home, I bought a Lancashire cheese volcano which needed using.  The husband likes a pie and there is nothing more Lancastrian than a cheese and onion pie (except perhaps a butter pie...again later....or perhaps hotpot, which isn't veggie.)

So tonight I made a pie containing four sliced and fried leeks mixed with crumbled cheese and an egg to bind the mixture.  This was decanted into a short crusted pastry casing with grainy mustard mixed in.  It was egg glazed and had the message "I love you", cut out of scraps, embellished on it. 

To accompany the pie I made tots.  I had never heard of tots until the other week when I saw them being made on "Drive-in, Diners and Dives" (American food porn.)  As the pie already had vertiginously cholesterol-raising levels of cheese in it I went for a basic recipe:

http://www.chow.com/recipes/29271-basic-potato-tots

They seemed quite dough-y and plastic when I tried to mould them.  I wondered if grating them in the food processor made them so as opposed to a hand grater.

They were pleasant enough, but not that crunchy on the outside and I wondered how they differed from Pommes Duchesa.

With them, for dipping I made a hot ketchup sauce from fried shallot and passata with  a splash of sherry, balsamic vinegar and a pinch of salt and sugar.