Homemade Meat Pie

I’ve always been a fan of slow food. I like spending time in the kitchen and just cook (and sometimes bake). Cooking is like therapy for me. The smells and flavours are always so comforting in the cold weather.

We’ve had cold weather floating over Ottawa lately. While it means that I’ve been getting deeper sleeps at night, I have been lacking the motivation to cook. Then, while I was flipping through the grocery flyers, ground beef caught my attention. Something told me that I had to make meat pie. So I did.

Diced onions, tomato paste, herbs, were all cooked down a bit before I added broth. Once the contents began to simmer, I crumbled the ground beef into the pot and let it slowly simmer over medium heat. By cooking the raw meat slowly in the flavoured broth, I feel like the ground beef becomes tenderer than if I had browned the ground beef like every other recipe instructs.

Just like the french onion soup speed bump, I added too much liquids again. Oops. I took almost half of it out and added some toasted and cubed sandwich bread to thicken up the meat filling. The bread dissolved and thickened the meat filling until there wasn’t anymore liquid broth. Actually, I cheated a bit and skimmed off more of the broth at the end. In any case, the pastry will turn out much better in the end if the filling is not liquidy.

Mom made the pastry while I hovered around the filling. All purpose flour, salt, Tenderflake lard, vinegar, and egg was mixed together with intuition. For those of us who can’t wing it, Tenderflake does include a recipe on their packages. No worries.

After dividing the pastry into four balls, the pastry was covered and rested in the fridge for an hour or two.

Ideally, the filling should be room temperature or cold before putting the pie together.

We baked it. Savoured it. And finished it.

The pastry was beautiful! I thoroughly enjoyed it. It shattered into pieces when it was met with the fork. The meat pie was perfectly baked and wasn’t heavy or soggy. I was so happy as I ate my slice with ketchup.

Meat pie.