Time for more man friendly food. The Husband is a huge fan of anything in a flaky pie crust so when I offered to make this particular recipe he was rather pleased. This recipe comes from Racheal Ray's magazine, although I made quite a few modifications which I have noted below. I have to confess that Racheal Ray really got on my nerves at one point since she was on Food Network something like three times a day and she says "EVOO" way too much but I actually like her magazine. The recipes tend to be kid and husband friendly, are pretty fast to prepare and don't have too many hard to find ingredients. As much as I like to cook I don't want to spend my entire life hunting down ingredients or preparing meals. Most of the recipes in the magazine go up on the website sooner or later so it is worthwhile to look around the website a bit.
In the recipe she uses puff pastry but since I am a pie crust kind of girl I got my food processor out and went to work.
For the filling I used ground beef, finely chopped baby carrots, potatoes and onions, but no celery unlike the original recipe since The Husband is not a big fan. Celery is one of those things that I will buy, use maybe one or two stalks and then end up throwing away when it inevitably rots. I tend to never ever have it in the house because it just ends up going in the garbage can. Too bad you can't buy it in minuscule portions.
Since The Husband loathes beer I went to poke around the liquor cabinet and came back with my usual back up, brandy.
French booze makes pretty much everything taste better.
After adding a very generous glug I let it cook for a minute or two so that the alcohol would evaporate. At the very end I added in some cheddar cheese.
I let the filling cool down for a bit as I rolled out the pie crust. After filling it I brushed it with an egg wash.
The finished product:
Even though I have made many, many pie crusts I always feel happy pulling out a perfectly golden pie out of the oven; it makes me feel like a 1950's housewife.
The pie was excellent although when I cut the first piece I didn't cut down hard enough and it sort of fell apart. Oops. It made lots of leftovers and was quite nice to have on a cold night. The recipe is very straightforward and even faster if you just use puff pastry instead of making a crust so I would definitely recommend that you give it a shot.
