Turn your Christmas leftovers into a French feast!

 

 

If you are fed up with living on turkey sandwiches between 26th December and New Year, we had a word with the restaurant staff at the Château d'Yeuse in Cognac and they passed on this fabulous recipe. You will see it makes use of that town's most famous product, so hopefully you'll have a drop left after flaming your Christmas Pudding! The Tourte is quite unusual in that it uses shortcrust pastry for the base and puff pastry for the top, but it works! 

 

Turkey Forestière Tourte

Ingredients:

400g turkey meat

400g button mushrooms

2 shallots and 1 onion (or 2 onions)

1 tablespoon cognac

1 egg yolk

Parsley

40g butter

150g block of fois gras (optional) or

150g cream cheese

Salt and pepper

1 pack ready-made shortcrust pastry

1 pack ready-made puff pasty

 

1: Clean and quarter the mushrooms, then melt half the butter and sauté the mushrooms over a high heat until they have taken on colour and lost their moisture. Set aside in a bowl.

2: Chop the parsley (a handful), finely chop the onions (and shallots if used ) and cut the turkey into chunks. Melt the rest of the butter into the mushroom pan, and saute the turkey over a high heat until browned. Turn down the heat and add the onions/shallots and let them soften and go translucent. Turn up the heat, add the brandy and flame (light if it doesn’t ignite spontaneously)

3: Turn down heat, add the mushrooms and parsley, salt and pepper, then mix and then set aside to cool down. Once cool, put in fridge for 1 hour to chill (very important if you want your puff pastry to rise!)

4: Preheat oven to 180o. Line a pie dish with greaseproof paper, then cut a disk of shortcrust pastry to fit the base and come up the sides. Spoon on the turkey mushroom mixture leaving a 1.5cm gap round the edge.

5: Dot the top of the mix with either slices of fois gras or teaspoons of cream cheese. Cut a disk of puff pastry slightly bigger than the base, and place over the mix. Pinch the edgesof the puff and shortcrust pastry together to seal the pie.

6: Brush the top with egg yolk and bake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes until golden brown.

 

Serve  hot with green salad or, like we did last year, leftover sprouts and pickled red cabbage!