Winter Peach Pie and Cornish Pasties

Today I made Winter Peach Pie in the morning and took it to Sues, the wife o’ my life, at work and all her co-workers really enjoyed it!

It was interesting that I was just saying yesterday how I was having such a hard time with rolling out the crust and so I went back and re-read the instructions that Irma had written. The thing that intrigued me was that I was always trying to use as little flour to roll out the crust as possible and she said that experienced bakers use very little while a novice should start out by using more, so I did. She also said (did I miss this before?) that when you roll out the dough you should not roll all the way to the edge of the dough, but stop short a little and turn the dough not the pin to roll out even round crust. Today my crust rolled out with an ease that made me literally smile out loud!

The pie itself had an interesting combination of raisins and canned peaches with tapioca and the usual spices. I was surprised that the pie came out as solid as it did, not as solid as the apple, but it was very fluid when I put it in the oven.
Like I said the crust gave my no trouble at all and one of Sues’ co-workers said that she makes really good crust, but mine was better. I guess I will stow that away for when it gets really frustrating.

For dinner tonight we had Pasties. I spent a few years in Butte, Montana and it was always a mining town and the Cornish came to The Midwest and then to Butte and brought this wonderful dish with them. It is a sort of a turnover filled with beef stew. It is a crust like pie, but with a little vinegar and an egg in the dough. You are suppose to make the crust real thick where it comes together so that you can eat the “pie” and then toss the crust-handle that has all the coal dust on it because you can not wash your hands to eat lunch while you work n the coal mines. They did not have coal mines in Butte, just copper and silver. But the pasty still was very popular, in fact when I lived there you could order a pasty at almost any eatery in town and since you could they all had gravy, because you would not serve it to some folks without gravy, while others enjoyed theirs with catsup. All of this gave birth to one of the strangest food combinations I have ever seen…French fries and gravy, not my first choice.

Beyond all that I had a very hard time with putting the pasties together according to Irma’s recipe. I mixed up the ½-inch cubes of beef steak, potatoes, turnips and carrots and the chopped onion. Then I rolled the dough (nice soft malleable dough) out into 6 8-inch circles and I had enough filling for about two more pasties and when I tried to assemble them the dough proved quite fragile. I did preserver through it and baked then to a golden brown and they were very tasty. In order to get the full effect I had half of mine with catsup and half with gravy. I can not decide which I liked best…I could have eaten three of them, but only ate one.