Enlarge This Image
Meat pies: A hearty Alaska wintertime snack
This week has been cold where I live, clocking temperatures into the negative twenties, easily. Life doesn’t stop at our lodge when it is this cold, but it certainly slows down.
The crew at our lodge is working on building a new cabin. It’s a project they began in the fall, tearing down the old log cabin that has been on our property since the early 1950s. Our lodge was an old hunting camp in those years, and the Red Lake Trail cabin was one of the original buildings remaining. The team put in the foundation of the cabin before the ground froze, and now they are working in the bitter cold to get the cabin framed in and finished before our busy time surrounding the Iditarod.
My kitchen table is covered with a pile of clothing: face masks, headlamps, caps, gloves, boots, goggles, and more. It’s a process just to get dressed to head outside. The outdoor crew head out when it is daylight, back in for a warm-up of coffee and cookies, and back out the door again. That repeats all day long with a longer break for lunch, and dinner is after the sun has set. In the kitchen, we are cooking all day to keep up with our hard-working crew’s metabolism.
For many years, my husband Carl and his team have been building our cabins themselves. Carl built my kitchen at Winterlake Lodge. It’s a nice 30-foot by 30-foot room with a big worktable that separates the kitchen table from the working area. The worktable is measured to my height and the counter lies just where my hands come to work. Every bit of equipment in the kitchen has been flown in by airplane, including my walk-in refrigerator and two-oven, eight burner stove.
To keep the guys going in cold conditions, we keep plenty of snacks out at the coffee station. Meals are hearty high-carbohydrate affairs and it seems it is the only time the guys sit down all day long.
Today, we made little handheld meat pies similar to Cornish pasties as a snack to send out to the construction site. These meat-filled pastries are easy to handle in the cold weather and are filling as a snack on the go.
I realize that I have been making these little pies and sending them out to my husband at one construction site or other for nearly thirty years now. The following for pies is adapted from a recipe included in a cookbook I wrote in the early 1990s. Adjust the fillings to your own personal tastes. We used ground beef, sharp Cheddar cheese, balsamic slow-braised onions, herbs and lots of garlic in today’s version. I’ve included the original recipe but use the same basic procedure to create your signature combination.
Pastry for two 9-inch pie shells
Mix the flour and salt together and place onto a counter top. Cut the butter into 1-inch pieces. Rub the flour and butter between your fingertips until the mixture is pea-sized in texture. Add in the cold water, a little bit at a time, until the dough is just moist enough to form a ball. Flatten the dough with the heel of your hand and wrap it in plastic wrap. Refrigerate the dough for about 30 minutes before rolling it out.
Makes enough dough for 8 4-inch pasties.
Handheld Pie Filling
Heat the oil over medium heat. Add in the garlic and sauté until it has softened. Add in the onion. Sauté the onion and garlic mixture until the onion is soft and golden, about 8 minutes. Remove the onion and garlic from the pan and set aside. Add in the meat. Sear the meat over medium-high heat, browning on all surfaces. Add in the onion-garlic, mixture, the potatoes and turnip and mix well. Set aside.
Remove the dough from the fridge. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to about 1/4-inch thickness. Use the lid from a saucepan or from a plastic food container to cut out an 8-inch or smaller circle.
baking with Bill & Sheila
_____________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)
Return from pies to Home Page
If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:
Follow spanishchef.net on TWITTER
