Marc's Musings

After my trip to New Zealand, I decided to make a meat pie each month in 2011. Today’s meat pie was a Beef & Onion pie based in a recipe from Blokes Who Blake. And it was good.

The recipe on Blokes Who Bake is:

• 500-650 grams Quality Mark chuck, blade or gravy beef steak
• 1 each onion and carrot peeled and diced
• 2 swede, peeled and diced
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 45 gram packet beef flavoured soup mix*
• 2 tblsp tomato paste or puree
• 1 1/2 cups water or beef stock
• 100 grams mushrooms, sliced
• 1 cup frozen peas (optional)
• 400 gram packet frozen savoury short pastry, defrosted milk to glaze

* Any beef or tomato-flavoured soup mix can be used for this recipe to add flavour and variation.

Living in North America, I didn’t fully understand the recipe. For instance, I know many Swedes but wouldn’t put any of them in a meat pie.

So here is were my substitutions:

• 1.5 lbs of cube steak from Joseph’s Market
• A couple parsnips instead of swedes. (I didn’t know what Swedes were but figured they were a root. It turns out they are rutabagas.)
• I didn’t have any soup mix, so I just sorta mixed a bunch of spices: basil, oregano, “italian spice mix,” black pepper, salt, onion salt, parsley, garlic powder, and some sun-dried tomato herb oil dipping seasoning from Pampered Chef. (I might have used some other spices too…just made the mix to taste.)
• and, in addition to the garlic powder in the seasoning mix, I doubled the minced garlic called for in the recipe

Oh, and for pie crust, I just used the pre-made stuff from the grocery store.

It took a couple hours from start to finish. Next time I will try rutabagas. And I won’t simmer the pie filling for the full 45 minutes. It got a tiny bit dry when I did that.

But there will be a next time!

It’s a snow day here in Maine. But my kids are plowing through school work. Even the one in public school is doing homeschool work.

I love homeschooled kids.

I have an appreciation for public schooling. We need as many people educated as possible. And I was really good at it, high honors and all that. But one of the things I learned from the classroom was that there was little reward for completing work. I still had to sit there. And people that didn’t complete their work didn’t really have any consequences.

One of the things I learned from the way school was set up (public and private) was the importance of warming a seat. Attendance was half of the battle. And the kids that didn’t act up or cause trouble were the “good kids.”

But homeschooled kids are not only learning the same subjects, they’re learning the importance of work. The system is different. There is a freedom to choose what to work on. And the reward of being able to be done when the work is done.

When I was in New Zealand with my 8 year old daughter, she always started her day doing her math work. It wasn’t her favorite, but she knew if she did it first, she would be done with it for the day.

It strikes me that this is so important with life too. There are increasingly few jobs that reward people for simply warming a seat. Today, people need to know how to work. They need to know what constitutes accomplishing a task and how to manage their own workflow.

As an entrepreneur, I get paid for work I do, not the time I take to do it. Home schooling creates a structure that teaches this by it’s very nature.

Just like my kids are doing today.