Atomic Nerds

Winter started this week. I don’t care what the calendar says, here we had a sudden, hard, cold snap, complete with snow. I’m dancing for joy since this means a lot of plants that had been tormenting me with their gametes are now dead or dormant, but either way it’s shifted my food desires from meat with lots of fresh vegetables to the sort of kitchen-warming, rib-sticking dishes o’ density that go perfectly with a fire outside and a frost out.

I have a thing for meat pies. I really don’t know what it is; it’s not like my immediate family are from anywhere they’re commonly made, so my entire childhood food memory of meat pies consists of the heavily spiced mystery-meat creations I could get when the Ren Faire came to town. I knew they were made with the cheapest things available (which is traditional), but there was something subersive to me about putting meat in a pie, and I always passed up the giant turkey legs and skewered steak for the meat pie and ate every last bite. No one else I know shares this bent, so until now the house has been large meat pie-free. Now that I’m in the driver’s seat, I can scratch this itch with impunity.

So, this week I decided to go for a traditional kind of meat pie: the pasty. I like lamb and there’s pretty much no point at which I get tired of it, so I wanted lamb pasties.

ingredients
350g lean lamb, diced
1 tablespoon butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 potatoes, diced
2 tablespoons chopped mint
salt
pepper
1 tablespoon plain flour
375ml beef stock
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ cup frozen peas
6 sheets puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

method
Brown the lamb on all sides in the butter. Add the onion, celery, carrot, potatoes and mint. Cover and cook for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Add the flour and continue to cook for a few minutes.

Add 1 cup of the beef stock and cook covered for 30 minutes, or until tender. Gradually add the rest of the stock as required during cooking.

Add the Worcestershire sauce and peas. Take off the heat and allow to cool. If the meat mixture is warm it will melt the pastry.

Take a sheet of pastry and cut out a round the size of a saucer. Place a large spoonful of mixture in the centre of the pastry. Brush the edges of the pastry with beaten egg and fold over. Pinch with thumb and forefinger all the way round the edges to seal. Brush the top with beaten egg and put onto a greased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining pastry and filling to make 6 pasties.

Bake in a preheated oven 200°C for 20-30 minutes until crisp and golden.

Makes 6

At this point doing things strictly by the book would be boring, plus if I’m going to make meat pies they’re going to have exactly what I want in them.

350g lean lamb, diced

Yeeeaaah. How ’bout we just get ground? It’ll save a step and also save me from having to select a cut of lamb from the limited selection in the grocery store that’s suitable. Seeing as how we still don’t have access to lamb necks and all. This calculates out to about three quarters of a pound, but seeing as how we’re not poor tenant farmers I think having a little extra lamb is just not going to hurt us any.

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

No. I have no objections to the flavor of celery, but I have a fundamental issue with the texture of cooked celery, so unless I’m making soup or a cajun-creole dish with trinity I always skip this step.

1 carrot, finely chopped

This part I just plain forgot while I was at the grocery store. Eh, whatever; part of the point of these kinds of dishes are using up odds and ends. Buying extra odds and ends to conform to the recipe is optional.

1 potatoes, diced

Sure, why not? Also, because I like it, especially in winter stews and braises, I decided to throw some turnip in there too.

2 tablespoons chopped mint

See also, “forgot while I was at the store”. This omission I regret more than the carrot, since it would have added more/more interesting flavor.

6 sheets puff pastry

I bought two packages while I was at the grocery store just to be sure I had enough… and then discovered that each package only contains two sheets of puff pastry. While this still wound up being more than enough food for two hungry adults (we wound up splitting one pie and saving the fourth for the next day’s lunch), here my mental nightmare of trying to calculate the subsequent adjustments for two fewer pies with no carrots and extra turnip and lamb began. I also learned a very important lesson, which is that I can do only one kind of math in my head at a time, but more on that later. On to the cooking!

1. Remove all sheets of frozen puff pastry from their packaging and find them a cutting board to rest on while they thaw. Preheat your oven to 200*. Find the essentials: another cutting board to sunder the vegetables on, a vegetable peeler, your trusty Santoku, and an acceptable XM channel to listen to while you work. Suggested: 90’s alternative. The metal has been a little too brutal and that’s a hazard to the fingers. The blues just encourage you to drink more while you cook than is healthy for the cook or the meal.

2. Start peeling the potato. Do as much as you can while hanging onto the skin-on end before you have to switch.

3. Retrieve the potato from the garbage can. Good thing you changed the bag right before you started. Right, important lesson: raw peeled potato is very, very slippery.

4. Have a serious internal debate about the volume of the potato. Potatoes don’t come in standardized unit-sizes and reducing by one third therefore doesn’t seem sensible; there’s also the troubling question of the turnip and just how much volume it will add and how much you should therefore reduce the potato by, since they’re both serving the same “root vegetable” category of flavor and volume. Additionally there’s the equally perturbing question of the carrots, which also do not come in standardized sizes, and how much volume their elimination leaves open; we are, after all, going to have to fit all of this into four sheets of puff pastry. Plus there’s also the matter of the lamb, which we have an extra quarter pound of even before considering two pies’ less of volume total…

5. Fuck it! Are we mice, or are we cooks? So there might be leftover filling! So what! Cooking is easy! ONE POTATO, ONE TURNIP, and DAMN THE TORPEDOES.

6. Dice the potato. Another new discovery: raw potato contains a tremendous amount of sticky starch-slime that might as well be like school glue when it comes to adhering the bits of potato to your knife, your board, and anything else not made of ceramic or glass. Optional: let your Kitchen Bitch have the fliers produced by the combination of blade-sticking and vigorous chopping. She probably won’t eat them, but she might, and either way you’re going to have to clean those bits off one surface or another later anyway. Deposit the diced potato in an appropriate vessel.

7. Peel the turnip, which fortunately contains less slime. Dice, which for this reason will take quite a bit less time than the potato did. Optional: add turnip next to brussels sprouts on the list of “vegetables that Kitchen Bitch is mysteriously enthusiastic about”.

8. Contemplate your onion. It’s a pretty big onion, so we’ll call half of it a proportionate amount to add to our filling. Peel it, then hack it in half and take a healthy step back to see if this is a Weaponized Onion. We’re pretty sure the responsible farmer has been stopped, but you never know.

9. This onion is compliant with UN guidelines regarding vegetables and chemical warfare, so sling half into a plastic bag and into the fridge, then set about the other half. Take a few moments to revel in this being the one preparation-related task where knife skills are irrelevant, since if you just hit it enough times with the knife you’ll achieve the recommended fine chop.

Brown the lamb on all sides in the butter. Add the onion, celery, carrot, potatoes and mint. Cover and cook for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

10. Chop a tablespoon’s worth of butter off the stick on the principle that we should almost never skimp on cooking fats, turn the burner to an acceptably middle-groundish “medium”, and start melting the butter. Fish around in the fridge for the pack of ground lamb. Locate a pair of scissors to open the top. Attempt to extrude the meat into the pan. Wait a few minutes with the upended pack of meat and wonder if they turned gravity down today.

11. Squeeze the package like a recalcitrant tube of toothpaste, getting most of the meat out. Scrape the rest out with your fingers while you try to stir the rest of the meat at the same time. Wash your hands and the handle of your stirring implement. Wonder what the fuck was wrong with the “plastic-wrapped meat in a diaper on a styrofoam dish” model of meat-packing that they had to go to this version. Toss the meat around until it’s mostly browned on most pieces on most sides.

12. Dump the vegetables into the pan and mix as vigorously as possible without losing an unacceptable number of casualties to the burner. Cover and cook for ten minutes. Waste the time at your favorite internet time-wasting location. Or second favorite- porn is a bad choice for right now, as it will invigorate entirely the wrong appetite.

Add the flour and continue to cook for a few minutes.

13. This step is so simple even you can’t screw it up. Just stir it in with the browned meat until it’s merged with the fat from the butter and lamb.

14. Cheat: take advantage of your spouse, who for once is not distracted trying to get work done, argue on the internet, drinking scotch, or fiddling with the AR, and is in a helpful mood. Have spouse take the now-thawed sheets of puff pastry, and cut a large round from each, put the stack of rounds in the fridge, and likewise put a bowl of the scraps into the fridge.

Add 1 cup of the beef stock and cook covered for 30 minutes, or until tender. Gradually add the rest of the stock as required during cooking.

15. Realize you never bothered to do the conversion from milliliters to cups of stock and therefore have no idea how much was ultimately supposed to be added, wonder if the hypothetical amount of stock should be reduced for two fewer pies anyway, then shrug and pour in a cup. “Until tender” is a given for the lamb, given as you’re using ground rather than a tough stewing cut, so cook until the turnips and potatoes are tender, which is pretty much now. There’s thirty minutes saved.

Add the Worcestershire sauce and peas. Take off the heat and allow to cool. If the meat mixture is warm it will melt the pastry.

16. Remove the bag of frozen peas in your freezer, which are currently behaving as a unitary bloc. Violently bludgeon the bag against the counter until you’ve shattered their resistance, then extract a quarter-cup of the victims and add them to the filling mixture. Splash in the Worcestershire and mix well. Throw in several dashes of salt-and-pepper mix, since you forgot to season back in step twelve. Remove the meat from the heat, leave it to cool down for ten or fifteen minutes, and ignore your helpful spouse’s hairy eyeball at your unanticipated excess of free time, where making rounds out of the puff pastry sheet would logically have gone. (If you don’t have a helpful spouse, this would really be a good time to do that, don’t you think?)

Place a large spoonful of mixture in the centre of the pastry. Brush the edges of the pastry with beaten egg and fold over. Pinch with thumb and forefinger all the way round the edges to seal. Brush the top with beaten egg and put onto a greased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining pastry and filling to make 6 pasties.

17. Poke the filling, which is, all right, still warm, but it’s not HOT anymore and you figure it’ll probably not melt your pastry. Grease up a baking pan and find a clear surface to put it. Crack an egg into a bowl, whose yolk will remain annoyingly intact during one of the few occasions that’s not a goal, and beat it savagely with a fork. Remove the pastry from the fridge and carefully arrange it in the center of a plate along the lines it was previously folded.

18. Spoon filling into the center until it looks like you’ve used roughly a quarter of that which is in the pan. Brush beaten egg around the edges of the pastry. Carefully tug the left edge up and let the filling slide rightward a bit as you fold the thing over and pinch the edges firmly to seal. Brush the top all over with the egg.

19. Adopting a careful and measured manner common to bomb-squad members and people holding thoroughly used diapers, transfer the resulting pasty from the plate to the baking sheet. Edge it over as far to one side as you can, given it’s apparent that all four pasties are only barely going to fit in one pan. Repeat twice more.

20. Discover your inability to judge volumes by eye is perfectly intact as it becomes undeniable that there is about half a pie’s worth more filling than there is space inside pastry sheets. Transfer as much as you can get away with to the last pastry round, give a few bits of lamb to your Kitchen Bitch if you have one, and feed the rest to your garbage disposal or equivalent family member. Fold, brush, and transfer your last pasty. Insert the pan into the pre-heated oven.

21. The original recipe suggested turning the scraps into little rolled pastries coated with sugar and cinnamon. We don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so instead roll cheddar cheese into the scraps and squeeze the whole awkward knot as tightly together as you can. Add them to their own pan. Curse vigorously as it develops that, when you moved the oven racks last time to accommodate a dutch oven, you did not leave room for two baking sheets.

22. Borrow your spouse’s welding gloves to correct the problem. Insert the little pastry-cheese-biscuit things ten minutes out from when the pies are supposed to be done and return to your time-wasting.

23. Something is wrong. Nothing is golden, brown, or puffed. Although step one would have been a much, much better time to realize this, two hundred degrees Celsius is about four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which is what your oven is marked in.

24. FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

25. Reset the oven temperature. As it turns out both of you are hungry enough, and the filling tasty enough, to consume meat pie with raw dough, though the biscuit-things barely even bear looking at. As you uncomfortably attempt to digest this, put the remaining two pies and biscuit-things back in the now at-temperature oven.

26. Everything is now golden brown and puffed to three times its original size. Split a pie with cooked pastry (which is much, much better), put the remaining one in the fridge for later consumption, and try the biscuit-things, which are fairly tasty and would be much more appealing if you didn’t suspect the raw puff pastry in your stomach was assuming its intended cooked dimensions.

So, not one of my finest hours in the kitchen, but at least I can claim I’m in the same error class as NASA. The filling was quite tasty even if there was too much of it, and we might make these again once I live it down. I think I might actually prefer a different kind of dough overall than puff pastry, and I’ll be investigating those options next time I get a craving for meat pie. Which will probably be around the same time I forget what trying to digest uncooked dough feels like.

*If you’re insane enough to be using this as an actual guide to cooking lamb pasties rather than entertainment, it would be a good idea for you to bear in mind right about now that the original recipe was written for an Australian audience, and their ovens, unlike American ovens, are marked in degrees Celsius rather than Fahrenheit.

Posted Cooking Noob, Food |