steak & kidney pies

Sometimes the best plans are the ones made on the fly. And sometimes, those plans discarded are perfect for another occasion. Take my housewarming, for example. Plan A (drawn up thoroughly over glasses of vodka+glugg) was to have a pie party. Little pies for a starter, pot pies for mains, fruit pies for dessert. Pastry. Pie. Perfect. But then, the thought of making that many pies, and working an oven I'd never even turned on before to make said pies got the better of me. So we chowed down on too much venison instead.

It was a couple of months later, having battled the wind and the rain (and harbouring a not-so-little hankering for a cold beer) that I remembered about the pie party. And the ramekins that we had in our cupboard. And seeing as the plan for that particular night involved little more than me, the Bean, and Iron Chef on SBS, pie seemed the perfect solution.

dark beer. it is hard to measure when it foams.

steak & kidney pies
makes 4 pies (we crammed our mix into 3. bad idea.)

ingredients

350g cubed steak
150g cubed kidney
2 tbs plain flour
1 tsp cornflour
1 tbs vegetable oil
1 cup dark beer
1 carrot
170g mushrooms
1/4 C water
1 sheet puff pastry
milk

method

1. Get the steak & kidney and throw it into a bowl.

2. Throw the flour & cornflour on top. It looks like snow!

steaky marshmallows... hrm. gross.

3. Mix the meat and snow... I mean flours together until the meat is all nicely coated like sugar on a marshmallow.

4. Heat a pot up. Choose one that looks a little bit too large for the meat you're about to put in it. Toss in the oil, wait... heat... wait... ok! Now fry the meat up in batches. Don't overcrowd the pot. Pretend your meat is claustrophobic.

5. Toss the meat around the bottom of the pot until it browns. You just want to sear the outside so we get some of that happy brown-age going on. Mmm-hmm! *snaps fingers*

6. Now, the veges. Chop your mushies up into bits. Think bits of lego. Now slice your carrots up into semicircles. (Cut all the way down the carrot, length wise, and then into chunks. Easy!)

veges getting friendly in a pot

7. Veges go into the pot that you browned your meat in. Stir them around a bit, let them get hot.

8. Now tip the beer in and listen for the sizzle. (That's the veges going "ohhhhh that hit the spot" think male after football. Like that.) Stir around a bit til the fizz goes. Now add your water.

9. At this stage, you're probably thinking "very liquid very liquid gross gross gross", but we're almost there. Alls we gotta do now is toss the meat back in, stir quickly til the sauce starts to thicken and ladle into your pre-prepared ramekins.

fill ramekins (these were a bit too full)

10. Put your ramekins on a baking tray before ladling hot stuff into them. You only want to 3/4 fill them. The baking tray will minimise the pain you may feel in your fingers. It will also minimise the mess in your oven.

11. Now cut out some rounds from the puff pastry, a little bit bigger than the ramekin, give it about 1cm extra the whole way.

pies, ready for the oven (octopus is rear left)

12. Toss the pastry on top, squoosh the edges together so they stick. If you are Bean, you will cut an octopus out of the remnants and stick this on top of the pie you want to eat. This is misleading. There is no octopus in this pie.

13. Brush with milk until shiny and bung it in a 200C oven for about 20 minutes.

14. Wait til it cools slightly before eating. This lets the sauce thicken a little bit more. Mmmmm saucey!

eating it all up!