Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes where one mystified Muppet of a man mangles mathematics and makes meals. I’m your Fozzy Bear with Far More Hair, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipe is a fair bit of a work, with some stand-out results. Which makes it moderately frustrating that it wasn’t really my idea. For those unwilling to plumb the secrets of this mystery, (or unwilling to deal with a mild amount of whining) here’s a link to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

THREE POINT ONE FOUR ONE FIVE

Today’s recipe is really a great example of one of the reasons that I actually dislike prepping TOO far ahead of time with recipes. I am, of course, but one man. I have my own interests, dislikes, and my own blind spots. For instance, when, weeks ago, I stated I wanted to set up reminders for myself to cover all the important holidays, it was very easy to forget that I was bringing in my own preconceptions for what an “important” holiday is. All of which is a round-about way of saying I didn’t notice today was going to be Pi Day.

ARE YOU READY FOR MATH?!

I’m sure we’ve covered it on the sight before, but in case we haven’t: Pi Day is an American* pseudo-holiday, in that it’s not like, a federally recognized** or prominent religious holiday for March 14, because in America***, that makes it 3/14, like the first three digits of pi. As you might guess from the number of asterisks I had to throw on that, there’s a lot of weird little nuances to it. To address them in order: * - Technically, UNESCO recognizes March 14th as the “international Day of Mathematics”, which they did on the 30th anniversary of us doing it in America.  ** - The US House of Representatives has passed a non-binding resolution recognizing the day, to it’s federally RECOGNIZED, just not, like, enforced. ***  -I specify “in America” because I know most countries around the world use a “Day-month-year” system, while we are the only notable one that ONLY uses month-day-year, though some are fine with both, and some even go year-month-day*, or other changes. It is yet another way that how we measure things differs from the world at large, and the best explanation anyone has for why is the same reason as for the metric system: we picked up our way of doing things from how the UK USED to do it, and then when the UK changed to be more like the rest of Europe, we didn’t.

(* - Because I could to refuse the opportunity to stack an asterisk INSIDE an asterisk explanation: the choice of ordering year-month-day, day-month-year, or month-day-year are, in computing science terms, “big endianness, little endianness, and medium endianness” systems, with “endianness” being a term for how your system prefers to organize data: does it handle the small things first (little endianness), the big things first (big endianness) or the medium things first. This system is based on, somewhat amazingly, Gulliver’s Travels: the Lilliputians had differing sects of society, “Big Endians” and Little endians”, whose defining characteristic, and the source of their conflict, was their preferred way of opening soft-boiled eggs at breakfast: big end, or little end.) Using this metaphor, in a world where most cultures open their soft-boiled eggs little end first (day-month-year), and a few open them big end first (year-month-day), we choose to open them…on their side.)

I want you to imagine how dumb an egg balanced sideways on one of these would look. That’s us, buddy.

Because it’s not a “real” holiday in my mind, I completely missed that it was today when I set my reminders for March. I also failed to acknowledge last Thursday’s “Mario Day” (MAR-10) for similar reasons. But luckily, all you Pie nerds had an ally on your side. Because Today’s recipe was another “fey mood” idea from my mother. For those unwilling to read the link, “fey moods” are a video game reference I make to describe how. for weeks at a time, my mother and brother can have relatively little interest in what I’m planning for the site, or what dishes we’re thinking of making, and then, some days, one of them will, seemingly apropos of nothing, decide that they’ve discovered an idea they want to pursue, and I get dragged along. I strive not to stomp on these ideas, because if you’ve read the site, you’ll know that one of the most frustrating parts of the blog is how little feedback I get when approaching my family about this sort of stuff. But man oh man, did this recipe come close: see, this particular fey mood struck my mother while I was asleep, so I woke up to find myself in the grinding gears of a system I did not like the look of: my initial planned post for today was and Irish Crème Brulee, because that takes about 15 minutes of hands-on effort, and then 5 hours of doing nothing. Instead, we got…well, let’s talk while we cook, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

A Three Hour Tour, A Three Hour Tour

Thank you, Title Jon, for spoiling the answer, but, yes, this recipe, as we made it, was a 3-hour endeavor. HOWEVER, I do want to preface that by noting that we DEFINITELY over-did it: We made two separate fillings, made TINY hand-pies, which took just as long to bake as larger ones would have (stupid pie crust, baking at a consistent rate based on thickness), and made way too much filling. AND went even further than that. You know how I’ve never mentioned that my family has a meat grinder?

Technically a “meat grinding attachment”, but who’s counting?

Yeah, we have a meat-grinding attachment for our stand mixer, and I’m pretty sure this is the ONLY THING it’s EVER been used for in my adult life. That was TWENTY minutes of the preparation: grinding a pound of chunked New York Steak, and two strips of country bacon, into a pound and a half of ground meat. And yes, my mother bought New York Steaks to turn into ground beef for hand pies. Why? I don’t know. She was at a new super-market looking for Cincinnati Ice Cream and Extra-Toasty Cheez-its, and decided “Why should I stoop to PRE-GROUND beef?” because left unchecked, every member of my family will turn into different monsters of petit bougeois mentality.

So obviously, if you want to skip that step, I urge you to feel free to do so. I can’t quite go so far as to say I “recommend it”, because…holy crap, guys, this meat was freaking GREAT. Like, yes, obviously, it Is at least 50% more expensive than the pre-ground, but…it might be worth it in terms of flavor.

Anyhow, that madness out of the way, we must immediately counter-act our darkest maximalist urges, and make the dish inedible to multiple cast-members, by adding mushrooms.

I hate how often taking pictures of things on our counters from above means that a foot ends up in the shot.

Specifically, we had sautéed mushrooms to serve with some steak we’d cooked the previous weekend, so my mother wanted to use up the remainder rather than throw it away, a fact I felt deep-down was flawed for some reason, but did not remember in time. (In my defense, as noted, this plan began when I was asleep, and due to frustrating timing, I went into it very distracted: in addition to, as noted, the plan starting while I was asleep, it should be noted that the word “plan” is itself a lie: my mother saw an AD and said “oh, a meat pie would be good”. Finding/creating a recipe for HER idea was my job, foisted on me while I was barely conscious, and before I had breakfast.) It also made sense to accommodate any vegetarian cast members by having some non-meat hand pies. So it was that we put them in, only for me to later remember that one of my cast-members is allergic to mushrooms, and another hates the taste of them.

Speaking of my job, it turned out to be moderately easy, as reviewing the top 5-6 recommended Irish meat pies/hand pies revealed that about 2/3rds of them were, almost word for word, the same recipe. We’re talking all the same ingredients, just with “double the potatoes” or “with twice as much tomato paste”. So I decided to take the bold step of adding like, 5 ingredients, including the mushrooms, which I further used to accommodate any vegetarians (though, given the amount of butter, not vegans) in the cast by replacing the beef in one batch of pie filling with them. The other veggies in the pie were diced onion, thinly sliced cabbage, and some cubed potatoes, where one chunk of spud made a hell of a break for freedom.

You all see it! It never touched the floor, so it’s fine!

So the first step is to cook down your potatoes, onions, and cabbage which took us FOREVER. I don’t know if it was the addition of onions (another of the aforementioned 5 new ingredients: another was the bacon in the beef mixture.), the age of our stove, overcrowding the pan, or (most likely) a mixture of all three, but while the recipes I checked said that 5 minutes on medium high would be enough for the potatoes and cabbage to “start to brown”, it took us twenty, and we ended up splitting up the veggie mixture into 2 pans for the last couple minutes to fight the “overcrowding” portion.

Once the veg was cooked, you’re supposed to pull it from the pan, and cook down your meat. We started with the mushroom, since it was the smaller pan. A couple minutes to wake them up, and then we hit the pan with some tomato paste to cook out for a minute, hit it with some Worcestershire sauce, then tossed the veggies back in with some salt, pepper, and instead of a half-cup of water, we went with Guinness, figuring that moving the dish a little closer to a pub-style “irish stew” would do it wonders. A tablespoon of soy sauce (for more salt/umami), and a sprinkle of herbs de provence (added, in all honesty, because we discovered we didn’t have any dried thyme in the house) and 10 minutes of cooking, and you got a mixture that looked and tasted very fine.

Full disclosure: this picture is labeled “ACTUAL mushroom mix” on my computer, because I accidentally mislabeled a picture of the beef, and that’s how lazy I am.

Which then began the arduous process of making the pies, another process that you can do more wisely: My mother and I went with the smallest dough-cutter ring in her set, in order to make 24 mini hand-pies each of the vegetarian and beef varieties, so that everyone in my cast could have both. YOU can go up a couple sizes, and use up the same amount of filling in, say, 10 ‘normal’ hand pies each, meaning you can cook the whole shebang on two baking sheets, rather than how we had to do a revolving process of “build 16 pies, put them in the oven, load up another tray to go in when the first batch comes out, repeat”, meaning we were baking for probably 72+ minutes, working in 12 minute batches.

A little edible assembly line!

The beef used all the same seasoning as the mushroom, except I replaced the soy sauce with a half tablespoon of my favorite black tar of salt and umami, Better than Bouillon paste, to add some richness and depth along with the salt and umami. (in retrospect, a spoon of Marmite probably would have been more in keeping with the UK vibe) I kept that mixture cooking while we handled the mushroom half of the oven assembly line, eventually taking over the responsibility of crimping folded pies when it was cooked.  Eventually, we had egg-washed meat (and mushroom) pies to feast our eyes and stomachs on.

Here’s one of the better looking Mushroom ones!

And the results? An interesting arrangement. Not all of the cast ate the pies, but everyone who did praised them, with several hailing them as amazing. I personally found that on the edges the pie crust could be a little dry, so I made a quick little curry mayo as a dip for them. Overall, I’d call them a success, and suggest you try them using the more reasonable options: bigger pies, store-bought meat, less chaos at the oven. I think they’re definitely a dish worth making.

THURSDAY: I REALLY DON’T KNOW. IT’S ST PADDY’S DAY, SO MAYBE SOMETHING IRISH, BUT I HAVE NO PLAN, AND AM UNLIKELY TO GET ANY SUPPORT. I DID JUST FIND A WEIRD TOPIC ONLINE THAT KIND OF LINES UP WITH SOMETHING I’VE GOT GOING ON, SO…EXPECT A CRISP-NEW POST.

MONDAY: I’VE GOT OPTIONS, BUT I’M A LITTLE TIME CRUNCHED AT THE MOMENT, SO LET ME WORK THAT OUT BY THURSDAY.

Recipe

Meaty/Mushroom Irish Hand Pies

Makes a lot of pies

2 tbsp vegetable oil

¼ head green cabbage, thinly sliced

½ pound potatoes, cut into small cubes

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 pound ground beef, or 1 pound mushrooms, minced and 2 tbsp butter

Salt and Pepper

4 cloves garlic, minced

1.5 tbsp tomato paste

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

½ cup Guinness

1 tsp herbs de provence or dried thyme

1 tbsp beef bouillon or soy sauce (optional)

1 package pre-made pie crust

1 egg (for egg wash)

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large skillet, heat the vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add onion, cabbage, and potatos, season with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring often, for somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes, until potatoes and cabbage are starting to brown. Remove from skillet.

2. Add meat or mushroom to pan, and brown for 5-8 minutes. Add garlic, and cook for 1 minute. Add tomato paste, and cook another 1 minute. Return vegetables to pan, and add Worcestershire sauce. Toss to coat. Add Guinness, herbs, and Soy sauce or bouillon if using. Cook for 10 minutes, until beer has mostly evaporated. Remove from heat, and let cool at least 5 minutes.

3. While mixture is cooling, roll out pie crust, and, using a 4-5” ring, cut out hand-pie crusts. Fill with mixture, fold closed, and crimp edges with a fork. Egg wash closed pies before cutting a steam vent on top.

4. Place prepared hand pies on parchment-paper lined baking sheets, and bake for 12-15 minutes, until golden brown. Let cool briefly, and serve.

5. (to make Curry mayo: toast ½ tbsp curry powder in 1 tbsp vegetable oil. Add to ¼ cup mayo, and add an additional ¼ tbsp curry powder. Stir to combine)