Potatoes, potatoes everywhere - Lord Woolton Pie

Wow... This thing is a beast! No wonder you could feed a large family with it and they'd be full for a good long time after. Either that or you could lob it at a Nazi and probably knock them out, with very little effort on your part! Not that you should, because this is a good pie. Not a great one, I think were I to have a bacon ration I would have probably used it in the pie, but the pastry is surprisingly good seeing as it's got a lot of mashed potato in it, to avoid wasting your precious margerine or lard ration. 

Lord Woolton, who was the Minister of Food in 1940, popularised the dish especially because it used lots of root vegetables and contained no meat. Apparently it was somewhat of a hard sell, because meat pies were so popular before and after the war. I quite liked the dish, but if we had the possibility of having some chutney or literally anything else to give it some flavour I would have appreciated that. I love root veg, but the Partner wasn't so keen and found it too bland. It's been the one dish so far that he has adamently refused to have for lunch the next day. 

During this time I've also been spending the evenings with the partner watching a Netflix series called World War Two in Colour. It's a fascinating overview of World War Two, though of course it can't provide a huge amount of detail about everything. But I've enjoyed learning about some topics I wasn't very familiar with, including the Nazi's attempt to invade Russia and the Japanese invasion of China. I did take GCSE history years and years ago, but it's always interesting to learn about a historical time period from different perspectives.

Lord Woolton Pie

Ingredients

• 225g Potatoes
  
• 225g Swede/Parsnips
• 225g Carrots
• 225g Cauliflower
• Bunch of Spring Onions, chopped
• 2 Stock Cube
• 1/2 Tbsp rolled oats
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• Bunch of parsley, chopped

Pastry

• 114g Wholemeal/Wholewheat Flour
• 56g Mashed Potato
• 42g Margarine or Lard
• 1 tsp of Baking Powder
• 1 tsp salt
• Dash of water if needed.

Method

1. Chop up the vegetables into chunks with those that take longest to cook into smaller pieces. Place in pot and bring to simmer with just enough water to reach 3/4 of the way up the veg in the pot.
2. Add in the stock and rolled oats, salt and pepper and cook until tender and most of the water has been absorbed. Do not be tempted to turn the heat up too high like I did, or you will burn the bottom.
3. Place mixture in deep pie dish and sprinkle with fresh parsley and spring onions.
4. Make the pastry by mixing the flour with the baking powder and salt and then rubbing in the margarine. Mix the mashed potato in to form a dough and knead. Roll out to form pie crust and place on top and decorate with any leftover pastry (to be truly wartime don't waste a scrap, it was illegal to do so)! 
5. Place in oven at 200C/180C fan for 30 minutes.

I really liked the pie, thought it was still delicious even with just loads of veggies. I'm a big fan of root vegetables, so I was quite happy with this. My partner not so much, this has so far been the one recipe he was not very complimentary about and evidently he took after the British public at the time who had to be persuaded into trying Lord Woolton's Pie!