3/22/09 Irish Beef Pie

Got potatoes and cabbage in the veggie box before St. Patty’s; that’s total inspiration to make something Irish. Looked through a bunch of recipes for traditional dishes and settled for Irish Beef Hand Pies (from Martha Stewart’s website of all places). The recipe says prep time 15mins, total time 1hr. Okay, I know better. That may be possible if you are the host of a one hour cooking show and there’s a team of people behind the scene cutting and dicing and prepping all the stuff (and you can pull them fresh out of the oven after the commercial break). The picture for this recipe shows photogenic little rectangular hand pies with the edges of the pies neatly crimped down with fork tines. But here in the studio kitchen of Peggy O’Chiang (with my 29 year old oven), there’s no full staff. Gotta peel the potatoes (Jon did that before disappearing upstairs), chop the cabbage, cook the ground sirloin and the veggies and put everything together for the filling. But wait! Need to thaw the pie crust if you’re not making your own, reads the recipe – who the hell has time to make your own pie crust on a weeknight?!?! And don’t forget to let the filling cool. Then you have to roll the pie crust out from a round 9” diameter to a rectangle and then divide it into 4 pieces to make “hand” pies. I’m sure all of you know I can’t follow a recipe, let alone something from Martha Stewart – turn a round pie crust into a rectangle – are you kidding me?!?! Screw that, it’s gonna be one big pie. Took about half an hour to bake. Came out pretty good. I would make it again, but maybe not on a weeknight. Prep time 1hr, total time 3hr.


In the Veggie Box:
Strawberries (4 boxes)
Chard
Cabbage
Oranges
Red leaf lettuce
Romaine
Lemons
Limes
Baby bok choy
Parsley
Broccoli
Mizuna
Potatoes (white)