Home-Made Meat Pasties

Well I made the mistake of looking at The Food Pornographer's blog while hungry, haha. I read this post about her having some delicious-looking pies from the bakery, and I decided I had to have some. Only problem was I couldn't get to a pie shop, so I decided to make them. I had two pieces of topside steak in the fridge that I had defrosted. I cut them up into little cubes and put them in my trusty non-stick frying pan. I also got a couple of small washed potatoes that I chopped up into very small pieces and added them to the pan. While it was cooking, I turned the oven on to about 180 degrees celcius for a fan-forced oven. Then I raided the freezer and found some frozen peas and sweetcorn, which I added to the pan. I didn't have any brown gravy (which is weird because I always have gravy - one of the housemates must have used the last of it and not told anyone) so I used some chicken flavoured gravy. I just put about a tablespoon of gravy powder into a cup and added a few centimetres of water and stirred it to dissolve all the powder, and mix out any lumps. I added that to the pan with a little more water, and then put the lid on to let it boil down (otherwise the pasties would be soggy and too wet).

Now I made the pastry by putting 2/3 cup of plain flour, 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder and 2 tablespoons of butter into a bowl. This was the fun part - I got my hands in there and rubbed the butter into the flour, until it resembled breadcrumbs. It always reminds me of when I used to make apple crumble at home - it was probably the only successful fail-proof dish I used to make, and my entire family loved it (or at least pretended to). To this, add a small amount of water and use your hands to mix it in so it comes together to make dough. If it's too sticky, add more flour until it doesn't stick to your hands. Then I rolled it out on the surface and cut the dough into eight strips.

I spooned a generous amount of the meat mixture (which had boiled down at this point) onto one end of the strip, and then folded the other end over, pressing the edges together, sealing the meat inside. Then I stabbed the top with a knife (very fun) and brushed a little drop of milk over the top, popped them in the oven for about 20 minutes, and started the boring job of cleaning up the mess. And here you go, the finished product, yummy home-made meat pasties!