Who follows a recipe to a T? NOT ME!

Pork from down the road,
beef from our backyard.

I love to cook but with my busy schedule most of the time I just slap something easy together.  Not yesterday.  Thumbing through one of my cookbooks I bought from an area restaurant, I came across their recipe for pasties.  It was a bit different from the usual recipe I use so I thought I would give it a whirl.  Ofcourse, I didn’t have all the ingredients (which is usually the case when I start to make something) so I had to modify and substitute.  

Browning the meats

This recipe called for 1lb of burger and 1lb of mild Italian sausage.  Burger - check!  Mild Italian sausage - hmmmmm - how about pork breakfast sausage that was raised down the road??  Sounds like it would work....guess I am not sure how different of a taste the two really are but thats what I was using for a stand in. 

Now for the vegetables - carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic and rutabaga.  Wait....rutabaga?  Why the hell would I have a rutabaga just laying around to be cooked??  I couldn’t even tell you what one looks like & quite frankly - it sounds gross!  Guess I will be substituting for that too!  I used extra carrots, potatoes and my newly added ingredient - celery to equal what I think would equal a medium sized rutabaga.....

Filling all ready

Chopped everything up and browned the meat, added some seasoning and pepper - the insides were ready.  Time for the crust.  Good gawdes...it called for 3 cups of shortening...I was already feeling my arteries starting to clog up just reading that.  But if thats what it called for and I had it then I was going with it.  Combined that with flour, eggs, white vinegar and cold water and it was ready to roll out.

I should have probably taken the advice of the cook book and seperated the dough into 12 equal balls but I didn’t.  I just grabbed a big blob and rolled it out, put the filling in and sealed it up.  When I put it on the large cookie sheet it took up 1/4 of it!  This was a jumbo pasty - over 9 inches in length and 5 inches across!!   Next blob of dough was a bit smaller but not too much.  In the end, I ended up with 1 jumbo pasty and 9 almost as jumbo pasties.  Shorted myself two pasties by not following directions - whoops!

One pan went in the freezer and the other in the oven for dinner.  I have to say it was nice to have dinner all cooked up and ready to serve by noon besides the fact that I was the only one here!  Good thing these are good reheated or cold cause thats how the rest of the family was going to eat them!  I served myself up one for lunch.  Job well done, it was awesome tasting...that was until later...when I kept burping it up the whole time at roller derby practice.  Nothing like tasting it again and again and again! 

Final results!

The hubby and kids liked them, recipe (or shall I say modified recipe) is a keeper.  I will most likely modify it a bit more the next time and reduce the vinegar in the crust though as it had a little bit of a vinegary taste.  Oh yeah and I forgot to mention I didn’t egg wash the inside or the outsides of the crust....another whoops!  So maybe I will add that in next time.