As I’ve been working on my goal of one meat pie a month, I’ve been getting to know the folks at our local butcher shop. Last month, I discovered one of them was from Great Britian. He was excited that I was making meat pies like he knew growing up. (Everyone else here thinks I’m making tourtière!)
He told me I had to make Cornish pasties!
Not only are they a comfort food for him, but they had a cool history. Apparently, miners needed a meal they could eat with their hands but were not sandwiches. And since they were so dirty and sooty, they had to be able to eat with only one hand. Thus, Cornish pasties were born. (For what it’s worth, he pronounced it “pah-stees”.)
These are exceedingly easy to make. I read as many recipes as I could from a simple Google search. (Alas, Blokes Who Bake didn’t have any recipes. Apparently Cornwall didn’t make it to the Kiwis.) But it was so simple, I created my own recipe.
1 lb ground pork
2 potatoes
1 onion
That was it.
I chopped the potatoes and onions and mixed them with the pork. My son put in some salt and pepper.
For the dough, I unrolled my trusty store bought pie crusts and cut 6 inch circles out of them. I was surprised to get 8! Spooned the filling in the circles, folded them over, sealed them, brushed with egg, cut a slit in the top, and popped them in the oven.
They baked at 425 for the first 10 minutes; then 350 for the remaining 35 minutes.
Today I continued my meat-pie-a-month commitment with a great pre-St. Patty’s day pie: Steak, Guinness, & Cheese. (January’s was a bacon & egg pie. February was a Beef & Onion pie.)
The recipe I used was on Epicurious.com and attributed to Jamie Oliver.
Beef brisket (1 inch pieces)
Store bought puff pastry
3 onions sliced
Sprig of rosemary
3 cloves of garlic; minced
1 tbsp butter
2 sticks celery – finely sliced
2 carrot sticks – peeled and sliced
Field mushrooms (portabella); as many as you like; sliced
1 can Guinness
1 heaping tbsp flour
Beef stock
2 handfuls of shredded white cheddar cheese
1 egg, beaten with a fork
When I went to my favorite butcher, Joseph’s Market, Danny recommended New York Sirloin rather than brisket. Apparently, they only sell brisket in 6 lb sections! (He also made me promise to try making Cornish pasties for one of my pies. He had them growing up and says they’re amazing!)
The recipe was sort of vague, so I got a couple pounds of meat. Everything was combined in a pot on the stove, one at a time. (I forgot the mushrooms, much to my family’s glee.) Oh yes, I also used Guinness Extra Stout. That’s how I roll.
Since this is a stew, I checked another cookbook and added oregano and Worcestershire Sauce. I also added garlic salt.
Then you bake the contents in the pot in an oven at 350 for a couple hours. Boy did the house smell good!
I sampled it about 90 minutes in and thought it a little bland. So I put some Lost in the Woods Hot Sauce to give it a little kick.
After the oven, you add a handful of cheese, pour the stew in a pie crust, and add another handful of cheese on top. Brush it with egg and bake it at 350 for 40-45 minutes.
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.
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.
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.
These are the second worst chocoalate chip cookies I’ve made. Last week, I made some cakey ones. Didn’t like those. So I thought these would be better.
Nope.
Not the World’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 C flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon or more cinammon
1 C butter
1 C dark brown sugar
1/2 C sugar
1 T vanilla extract
2 eggs
lots of chocolate chips (not quite a 24 oz bag)
Mix dry ingredients.
Mix wets.
Bake at 325 for 12 minutes.
And you get…this:
Ew.
The ones cooked on a metal cookie sheet weren’t any better.
My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are having a baby girl. So my job at their shower on Sunday was to get song suggestions from people and make two CDs: one for the baby, one for the new parents. (My wife has lots of cool ideas like that.)
Here’s what we came up with. Some songs were suggested by family and friends. Some are just songs that I love. And on the parent CD, some are songs that they can sing and think of each other.
I made my first pea soup today. It was really easy. I looked at a few recipes and made up my own:
6 cups chicken broth
1 lb split peas (rinsed)
3 carrots (cut in 1/4 inch slices)
1 onion chopped
3 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon black pepper
You mix everything together in a crock pot. Let it cook on high for 6 or so hours. And voilà! Pea soup!
The spice measurements are only approximate. I just guessed with those. And the chicken broth was because we didn’t have any ham and didn’t want to go out to get any.
Best part? The kids ate it up without complaint.
It went especially well with the loaf of bread my wife made.
Last November, my 8 year old daughter and I got to spend almost three weeks in New Zealand. In that time, I fell in love with meat pies. I’m not sure why, but the idea of having a pie for a meal, rather than just a dessert, captured my imagination!
So this month I’m starting a commitment to making a meat pie a month this year.
My daughter loved the bacon and egg pie we had in New Zealand, so that’s where I began.
My recipe came from my friend Kerri Tilby, our host in New Zealand. When I asked her for a recipe, this was her reply:
Bacon and Egg Pie is easy-peasy. Flaky puff pastry on bottom, break open half a dozen eggs, as many rashers of bacon as you like, chop up an onion, couple tablespoons of tomato sauce (ketchup), pastry on top and cook. I’ll find a proper recipe, but I’ve never used one! In NZ it’s one of those things you just watch your Mum make and then copy with your own children.
I found out that a “rasher” was “piece” of bacon.
Delicious and easy. This is going to be a fun experiment this year!
As I’ve been working on my goal of one meat pie a month, I’ve been getting to know the folks at our local butcher shop. Last month, I discovered one of them was from Great Britian. He was excited that I was making meat pies like he knew growing up. (Everyone else here thinks I’m making tourtière!)
My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are having a baby girl. So my job at their shower on Sunday was to get song suggestions from people and make two CDs: one for the baby, one for the new parents. (My wife has lots of cool ideas like that.)
