Irish Days

May those that love us, love us. And those that don't love us, May God turn their hearts. And if He doesn't turn their hearts, May He turn their ankles So we will know them by their limping.

Over the years, we have developed a"family" here in Missoula. When shit goes wrong (like it has for us this year) we know we've got an amazing network of some truly awesome people who have our back. About 5 years ago, we started celebrating that friendship with an annual shindig every March. It began with our fiesty Irish friend and our love of guinness and corned beef and over the years has grown to be quite the event. When we were all still in college, it happened on March 17th, now that we have "grown up" lives, it's moved to the saturday before or after and has been dubbed "Irish days". We cook and we eat and we drink and we sing and we toast (only old Irish toasts, of course)!

One of the staples of Irish Days is the Pasty. This little delight is more of an Irish-American dish, and allegedly originated in Butte, Mt. It's meat and potatoes in pie crust: perfect for the miners to pack for their lunches in the coal mines.

Ingredients:

Meat (chuck steak, ground beef, corned beef, leftover roast, whatever you want!)

Potatoes cubed

carrots

onions

Guinness

mustard

ketchup

salt

pepper

pie crust (I'm lazy and use store bought)

egg

Methods vary on pastys. Julie is usually the maker of the pastys so when I made them for our office function today I followed her method, but will share some ideas on how I'd do it next time!

How I did it:

Filling: Marinate the meat in guiness for an hour or so. cook the beer, potatoes, onions and carrots in butter and olive oil untill tender. Mix with mustard (I only had yellow which worked but I think spicy or dijon would be better), ketchup and seasonings untill it tastes good!

Crusts: Roll out the pie dough and cut into circles. Since I was making these for a crowd I cut them kind of small but if you were making them as a meal I'd reccomend making them bigger. Spoon the filling into the dough circles, fold over and pinch sides together.

Brush the crusts with egg so they brown up nicely and bake at 375 for about a half an hour or untill golden brown. Serve with gravy or ketchup, both delicious!

(ignore the 2 missing from the pan, they must have dissapeard in the oven!)

How I'd do it next time: So there are a couple problems with this method. The meat and potatoes tend to poke through the pie crust and the meat has a tendency to dry out. When I do this again, I think that I will add the meat and potatoes raw to the pie crusts and let the overn do all the work. I'm envisioning making little meatballs with the sauce, seasonings, carrots and potatoes all mixed up in the raw meat. I think this would solve the problem of the chunks poking out and the meat drying out. I'll let you know how it goes!

Dinner tonight is a rueben hash!