Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

Ingredients

3 rashers streaky bacon, cut or scissored into 2.5cm strips

1 teaspoon garlic oil

125g chestnut mushrooms, sliced into 5mm pieces

250g chicken thigh fillets cut into 2.5cm pieces

25g flour 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1 x 15ml tablespoon butter

300ml hot chicken stock

1 x 15ml tablespoon Marsala

1 x 375g (23 x 40cm) sheet all-butter ready-rolled puff pastry

Method

Preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7. In a heavy-based frying pan, fry the bacon strips in the oil until beginning to crisp, then add the sliced mushrooms and soften them in the pan with the bacon.

Turn the chicken strips in the flour and thyme (you could toss them about in a freezer bag), and then melt the butter in the bacon-and-mushroom pan before adding the floury chicken and all the flour left in the bag. Stir around with the bacon and mushrooms until the chicken begins to colour.

Pour in the hot stock and Marsala, stirring to form a sauce, and let this bubble away for about 5 minutes.

Take two 300ml pie-pots (if yours are deeper, don't worry, there will simply be more space between contents and puff pastry top) and make a pastry rim for each one - by this I mean an approx. 1cm strip curled around the top of each pot. Dampen the edges with a little water to make the pastry stick.

Cut a circle bigger than the top of each pie-pot for the lid, and then divide the chicken filling between the two pots.

Dampen the rim of the pastry again and then pop on the lid of each pie, sealing the edges with your fingers or the underneath of the prongs of a fork.

Cook the pies for about 20 minutes turning them around halfway through cooking. Once cooked, they should have puffed up magnificently.