INGREDIENTS:
2 chicken breast, uncooked, diced into small pieces
3 cups mashed pumpkin, cooled
250ml tub cream cheese
250g unsalted cashews
1 pack of puff pastry
Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste
METHOD:
1. Preheat your camp oven (or caravan oven, which we also had to use because the mixture made so much!).
2. In a large bowl containing the mashed pumpkin, stir in the cream cheese until it is fully mixed in.
3. Roughly chop the cashew nuts, so that they are about 1/3 of their original size, and add them to the pumpkin mix.
4. Stir in the chicken breast, making sure it is well-distributed through the whole mixture. There’s no need to pre-cook it.
5. Add salt and pepper to taste, if desired. We didn’t add any to ours, and it was beautiful, we didn’t feel it needed it at all.
6. Here’s where you can choose – because we had so much mixture, we decided to cook one large parcel (using an entire sheet of pastry) in our camp oven, then cook two other large parcels, along with 8 small pastries (using 1/4 of a sheet of pastry for each, in our muffin tray) in our caravan oven. In all honesty, while they all tasted divine, the large parcel from the camp oven was the standout. The pastry was just cooked to perfection – something about cooking in a camp oven!
7. The large pastry needed about 30 minutes in the camp oven, and we placed three layers of alfoil underneath it to ensure the bottom didn’t burn before the rest was cooked. This worked brilliantly.
8. We cooked the other two large parcels and muffin-sized pastries in our caravan oven, which also needed around 30 minutes for each batch to cook. You want the pastry browning nicely, which just a light crackle when you bite into it.
9. Best served warm.
We threw this together to use up some leftover pumpkin in or fridge but wanted to make sure it had some protein and substance to it. It was so simple, but absolutely delicious, and all things considered, we think given the serving sizes it made, pretty healthy with only the small tub of cream cheese!
