Select Meats large pie

We ended the month with a proper pork pie – one sampled before on the November 15^th 2009, from Select Meats of Loddon. Ashwellthorpe was the chosen munching location, parking at All Saints church with its single scratch dial. We headed off north, leaving the picturesque rear of the church with its large “E” shaped pond in the grounds. A one and a half mile loop round on footpaths, returned us to The Street, that we crossed and then headed south for St. Nicolas church in Fundenhall. Here we ate our sandwiches followed by After Eight mints! brought along by Joan. Having previously recorded the single scratch dial and feeling rather cold for stopping, we headed briskly south west to Fundenhall Street. The going was very muddy and frequently punctuated by styles to negotiate. We passed dairy cows, as we made our way north back to Ashwellthorpe, and on to the warmth of the White Horse. Here we enjoyed warm welcome and sampled very reasonably priced pints of Ruddles County and Swallowtail from the Humpty Dumpy brewery. It was then a short walk along The Street to the cars and straight into the large pie. It looked good and smelt good too, though not a great deal of aroma. A little jelly was present and added to the very good taste of this pie with a good crust, not surprisingly finding favour with the munchers giving it a good score of 8.9357 with a standard deviation of 0.49552. So a normalised score of 9 for Select Meats this time, beating their previous score of 7.

Roll mouse over picture to see uncut pie

The second course was kindly baked by Liz: a wonderfully moist and tasty fruitcake. No shortbread was needed after this.

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.