Banana Filo Pie

I'm a huge advocate of the "waste-not-want-not" policy to mealtimes. I will look at what I have in the cupboards and come up with something using two or three of these, and then maybe buy one more thing from the market. You use what you have, you don't waste money, no food goes to waste AND you flex your culinary muscle.

Recently I've been using quite a bit of filo pastry, and tonight I was posed the question:
"Can I prepare a dessert with little more than filo pastry and what is just lying around?"

Ingredients:

Filo Pastry (Total of about a sheet and a half, depends on the size of your overproof dish!)

200g Fruit (I use bananas, but strawberries or cherries would also work really well)

A small pot of jam (About 50g would be plenty)

An egg, some plain flour and about 3 tablespoons of sugar.

Firstly, dust the inside of your dish lightly with plain flour. Get your largest pieces of filo and almost create a jigsaw that covers all of the base and goes up and over the sides. The scruffier the better!

Now spread a small layer of jam (around 3mm) along the base of the pastry. I used apricot here, but anything could work! Use the back of a teaspoon to gently nudge the pastry into the edges. Now layer your fruit on top.

Try and cover as much space as possible, and make that fruit go really far! You don't want any fruit that going to go really soggy, but experimentation is the spice of life!

Dust the top of the fruit with a light sprinkling of sugar and use more filo to create a layer. Remember that this is a very thin pastry and can crack and tear very easily (as you're probably finding!), so be careful and loving with it, and it'll love you back!

Repeat again with the fruit and top of with filo. Bring over all of the edges and tuck this in too!

Beat the egg and brush this over the top before popping in a pre-heated oven at 200c for about 30 minutes. When it comes out the top will have bronzed beautifully, you fruit will be more succulent than ever and the smell will just fill the house!

Serve this with ice cream, my favourite (cornish clotted cream) or in this case, just your regular skinned cream! (I told you I was down to bare minimums!)

I hope you enjoyed reading this guys! My YouTube material is currently underway and we'll definitely have something uploaded within the next few weeks, thanks again for the support and comments and welcome to all the new subscribers!

Again, if there's anything you'd like me to try, let me know. I've also let a few sneak peeks loose on Twitter!

Dan

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