February’s meat pie: Beef & Onion

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!