Slow Cooker Christmas Dinner Pie Filling

However much I try, I generally cook a little too much food. I used to get annoyed about waste but these days I embrace the leftovers and nine times out of ten I create a new dish out of them.

On the weekend I made a mock Christmas dinner, which you can read about here. There was a little leftover meat and veg so I decided to make a Christmas leftovers pie. It’s seriously easy to do. You can of course make a sauce from scratch to accompany it or you could be totally lazy like me ( it is Christmas after all ) and use a tin of chicken and mushroom soup and a cube of jelly stock.

Now it’s hard to give an exact recipe for this as everybody’s leftovers will differ but here is what I used.

You will need:

Leftover cooked turkey, dark or white meat ( I cubed mine)
Peas
Chantenay Carrots ( chopped)
Leftover pigs in blankets ( chopped)
Leftover mash
Leftover stuffing – broken into small pieces
1 tin of chicken & mushroom soup
1 chicken stock cube ( I used a knorr jelly pot )
Cracked black pepper

Turn your slow cooker on low and add all your ingredients apart from the stuffing. Mix well and leave on low for 4-6 hours. Now add your chopped stuffing and leave with the lid off for a further 30 mins or so to thicken.

Remove, pour into your pie dish, top with pastry and place in a hot oven until the pastry is cooked. I made mine into two pies one using homemade shortcrust pastry for this and the second using storebought puff pastry and both worked really well.

The reason I use the slow cooker for this is because I can pop it all in,turn it onto low and go out for the day and all I have to do on my return is place into a pie dish and top with pastry ( store bought is fine ) and place in a hot oven to brown or puff the pastry up. It also tastes so much better when the flavours have been given a chance to mingle with the sauce. Serve with some leafy greens, maybe some cranberry sauce and it’s just incredible. All the flavours of your dinner in a comforting pie.

This is even better the following day….