My college age son has been making pasties fairly regularly, both for himself and for his roommates. This was not the recipe I expected him to want to share, but there is something irresistible about a meat and potato pie. My version of a pasty is more like a Michigan pasty than a Cornish pasty. When I was growing up in Northern Minesota, my mom used to pick up pasties on the way home from work for an easy dinner. They were filled with meat, potatoes, onions, and sometimes carrots. Crusts were relatively thin and flakey, and we loved them. I recently had the opportunity to try a pasty in England from the Land’s End Pasty Company (no connection to the U.S. Clothing company), and it was surprisingly different. First, the crust was very thick and the outer crimped crust was almost an inch wide. Then, the filling was slightly moist, like it included a gravy. My British friends told me pasties were the food of miners, and that they held the pasty by the thick edges with their dirty hands and only ate the center, clean portion. Good thing, because the outer crust was almost inedible. So I’m making my family Michigan pasties, brought to the U.S. mining country by immigrants, but clearly improved on from the Cornish variety. And making them with a store bought refrigerated pie crust makes them super easy – even suitable for a college student.
Pasties
Ingredients
- 1 package refrigerated pie crusts 2 crusts per package
- 1 ½ lbs ground beef
- 2-4 white potatoes
- 1 cup chopped carrots
- ½ cup chopped onion
Instructions
- Wash the potatoes and cut them into small cubes. No need to peel them.
- Brown the ground beef in a large skillet and drain.
- Toss the potatoes, onion and carrots, into the skillet with the ground beef and combine evenly. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- Unroll the pie crusts, and cut each crust in half.
- Fill the crust with approximately 1 ½ cups of filling, and fold crust over to form a pocket. Fold the bottom crust up and over the top crust all the way around the edges. Repeat for the other 3 crust pieces, forming 4 pasties.
- There will be a lot of extra filling. Wrap this filling into an aluminum foil pouch, and bake the pasties and leftover filling together in a 400 degree oven for about 35 minutes until the crust is lightly browned.
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