Some things just don't work out like you'd hoped

Take Scotch Pies, for example. There are still six of them in the fridge; help yourselves. Maybe other people make them better, but these are not very good. I was so hopeful; they seemed like perfect cold-weather food, and easy to pack for lunch, etc. Crust, yummy filling, you can hold it in your hand: what could go go wrong? I mean, calzones, burritos, pasties -- all good, right? And, less portable, you've got pot pies, ravioli, pierogies, all kinds of yummy things stuffed into crust or pasta or some such.

The crust, mostly, is what can go wrong. I know it wasn't supposed to be light & flaky like a puff pastry, but this was tough & chewy.

I read about Scotch Pies on the BBC last week; there was a contest, with a record number of entries, and I was intrigued. I had never heard of such a thing as Scotch Pies, so I looked up some recipes, and it sounded easy as, well, pie. And I gathered that, traditionally, they are filled with a cooked ground lamb & gravy mixture, but can hold pretty much anything from meat & vegetables to leftover vindaloo to Italian sausage & pasta, which seems weird to me too, but it had to do with a soccer game (which Scotland lost anyway). Scotch Pies are frequently served at football matches, it turns out, and are sometimes even fried.

They are not exactly haute cuisine, it seems. But I liked the idea; I frequently make leftovers -- especially curry! -- into regular old pot pies, with either a biscuit crust or regular pie crust. Which is what I'll do with the rest of the filling I made for these.

But I made the first batch of filling the other night, and didn't have time to bother with the crust. It was too late when I started cooking, and I wasn't even hungry by the time I had the filling ready to go. Ruby quite liked it, and I tried a little dish of it; it was in fact yummy. We had some for breakfast the next morning as well. I fact, we'd eaten about half of it by the time I got round to trying the crust.

But finally last night I went for it on the crust, after making a second batch of a slightly different filling, just in case I ran out.

I followed a recipe I found online for a kind of pastry I'd never made before: hot pastry, which is regared as essential for Scotch Pies, as it holds its shape best. Apparently. All the recipes I found are more or less similar: flour, lard and/or butter, hot water, and salt. You melt the lard or butter in the hot water, pour it into the salted flour, and proceed as usual. Being careful not to let it cool to much, nor to overwork it.

Of course the recipes all had wacky English measurements, but I carefully converted everything, and then weighed it to make sure. I didn't use lard. It mighta been better if I had. It mighta also been better if I'd used more flour. Dunno. I definitely overworked it. And it probably got too cool. And it was difficult to get the sides high enough, so they ended up too short, resulting in a suboptimal crust-to-filling ratio, which was especially disappointing given how yummy the filling was and how chewy and lousy-tasting the crust was.

So here's the first filling recipe:

2 pieces bacon, cut up into tiny bits
2 cups random vegetables, cut into tiny bits (in this case I used a 2 cup container from the freezer which had carrots, celery, onion, parsnips, and shiitake mushrooms all mixed together)
3/4 lb. ground lamb (or lamb cut up into tiny bits the size of peas or smaller)
1/2 cup frozen peas
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 c. flour (more or less)
1-2 cups vegetable stock and/or water
dash of Worcestershire Sauce, which I would recommend leaving out, but I used it
tsp or so of balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper

So you put the bacon in the pan, and when it's mostly cooked, add the chopped vegetables and cook until fairly close to done. Add the lamb (you could use a whole pound, and when it's cooked, stir in the garlic and the peas (which I microwaved a few minutes and then drained). At this point you could add leftover gravy and skip the rest, but I didn't have any, so I added 1/4 cup of flour and stirred it into the meat mixture; it makes a thick paste and you have to keep stirring for a few minutes, and then add your liquid. A cup is probably enough, but it will depend on how much moisture the vegetables released, etc. Then add your Worcestershire Sauce, vinegar, and salt & pepper to taste. If you don't have balsamic vinegar handy, use tamari or soy sauce (and omit or cut down the salt).

The second filling was pretty much the same except I used ground beef (I used ground sirloin - if you use something less lean you might want to drain off some of the fat, leaving about 1/4 cup, which includes the bacon fat from cooking the onions, etc., to make the gravy work) instead of ground lamb, onion & potatoes instead of all the other vegetables, and didn't use Worcestershire sauce. I cut the potatoes into little cubes about the size of peas, and put them, the peas, and a cup & a half or so of vegetable stock + water in the microwave for about four minutes and added them after I added the flour.

Put this into your favorite pastry shell, cover with a top crust, make some decorative holes in the top for the steam to escape, and bake for 45-50 minutes at 350F. Or go ahead and make the oil crust, fuss with it to make individual pies. Use pre-made refrigerated crescent roll dough, or frozen puff pastry if that's what you like.