Apple, mango, nectarine, sultana and chocolate pie

When you least want it, drama follows. What is the worst thing that could happen to a postgraduate student expecting to finish her 200-300 pages thesis anytime?

The computer died.
That was when I realized how valuable and precious the word "back up" means. Thank to the constant reminders from AR who even took the step of stashing a DVD of my write up in his office locker. "Just in case the house burned down," he said. I laughed it off then but now I'm so thankful that I have copies of my work everywhere.

As a tentative measure, I resorted to working on my laptop again. The only problem is that I have about 5-6 programs running at the same time and it is a 5 years old laptop... yup. U guessed it. It lagged big time. In fact, it crashed twice last night, and I had to remind myself to "stay calm" (especially since I was editing 316 references!).

Then the man who I pledged myself to be married to (In exactly 1 year 1 day's time) came to my rescue (HA! sounds so heroic! I can't believe I just wrote that statement!). He stayed up all night to fix the computer up. He grabbed a few moments of sleep as the computer loads. So, by the time it was 7:30am, the desktop was up and running again.

Thank you AR. =)

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In light of the above event, I decided to follow the theme and blog about a pie that I made around 2 weeks ago. I'm not even sure how I'm going to write the recipe up! As a disclaimer, this is probably one recipe that you should not try from this blog =) .



I had 3 pieces of puff pastry left and thought a pie might be a good idea to use it all up. Just as I was stewing the apple pieces, it occurred to me that 3 apples will not be sufficient to filled up the pie dish! Ok, correction, it wasn't a pie dish, it was quiche dish.

So anyway, after blind baking the pastry, it became really obvious that if I use that filling, the pie might become a "stingy pie". You know, the "full of pastry but barely there filling" pie? So guess what I did?

I went to the fridge and digged out every fruit I have in there. So that means my pie consisted of

1 mango
1 nectarine
n the 3 apples that I was stewing.

Ok. everything chopped and into the saucepan with the apples. Oh dear, it still looked sparse.

Open pantry cupboards.

Light bulb moment- chocolate! Chocolate makes everything taste good.

oh! And some sultanas. Ok, in the saucepan it went as well.



So here you go. This is my "Apple, mango, nectarine, sultana and chocolate pie"

3 pieces of puff pastry
3 apples
1 mango
1 nectarine
handful of sultanas
1/4 cup of brown sugar
1 Cinnamon stick
2 tsp of mixed spice
1/4 cup of chocolate chips

Line a dish with puff pastry. Patch pastry up if it didn't fit the dish. Blind bake for around 15 minutes.

Mean while, stew skinned and chopped apples, sultanas, nectarine and mango with brown sugar, cinnamon stick and mixed spice for around 15 minutes. Cook till soft. Line pastry with stewed fruit and sprinkle chocolate chips to fill the gaps if the filling isn't sufficient. Cover it with another layer of pastry, making 4 slits at the top. Bake for 25 minutes till puff and golden.

Serve with ice-cream.


hmm..ice-cream makes everything looks good ya?