Sunday 26 October 2008

Large Vale of Mowbray pie

The final pie to be sampled this month was a large Vale of Mowbray pie – after a confused start! Eventually, about half the pie munchers set off for Flordon with no tea ladies or tea! To get ourselves in prime pie munching condition, we set off on our designated route, once we eventually established exactly where on the route we were! From Flordon, we headed south down the Upper Tas Valley Walk to Hapton and the church of St. Margaret. This was locked and we didn’t spot the scratch dial we photographed when we visited in June of last year. We then headed west towards Fundenhall where we all got involved in harvesting the abundant supply of fungi for Charles. St. Nicholas church was closed so not investigated. Heading north to Ashwellthorpe, we made a little diversion into the village to have lunch in the porch of All Saints church. This not only provided a lunch location but a new scratch dial for the collection. This church too was locked. We then headed east where our attention switched from collecting fungi to collecting cans for Don. We made a short diversion down the B1113 for a rather poor pint of Wherry at the Kings Head. Resuming our can collecting, we continued our walk back to the car at Flordon. We ended our walk with a carrier bag full of cans and a good haul of fungi plus a new scratch dial. We then commenced the tea-less tasting, first nairn’s mini oatcakes with Waitrose supreme houmous and their supreme red pepper & feta dip. Don then produced a large Vale of Mowbray pie sourced from the Co-op, we had sampled small Vale of Mowbray pies in North Walsham back in March where they did not fare well. This pie when cut revealed a pleasing pink filling with a little jelly. The piecrust was OK, the filling odourless but having an OK flavour, slightly salt and enhanced by the application of mustard. The average score of 7.25 gets ‘normalised’ to 7.5, the standard deviation was of 0.28868 and completes this months pie tasting.