Saturday, December 10, 2011

Tourtiere

Well, if you follow along on Liminal Me's Blog, your sure to know that she is a wonderful cook.  I sometimes attempt to cook to, often with good food, less plating/presentation.  However, this time I may have succeeded in both!

While perusing the Walrus magazine, I came across a picture that looked divine, a peasant dish from Quebec called a Tourtiere. It looked good!  Now while Liminal Me often prepares lovely vegetarian dishes, I do not.  I make meat... lot's and lot's of meat.  As it turns out, this was no exception, being a meat pie.

I found a few recipes, but of course, I never really follow a recipe, rather use it as a general guideline.

For starters, I had a green pepper in the fridge and a few other veggies that I figured needed cooking.

1 small onion, 3/4 of a green pepper, 1 potato, 8 small carrots from one of those ready eat bags and I was off to the races.  I simmered this on the stove in some butter, well, a lot of butter and then threw in some of the spices.

The neat thing about this dish was the spices.  I rarely cook with savory, cloves and cinnamon.  They were a neat combination and provided some good flavor.  I'd like to say I know how much I put in... but I don't.  All I can say is that it needed more.



I took out the veggies and then cooked up a couple pounds of beef.  I could have used pork, but beef is what we had.  Also, it seems that game meat was popular back in the day.  Personally, this looked like it would work.  I threw the veggies back in and added more spices to taste.  Again, I could have used some more spice.


I tossed the mixture into a tenderflake pie crust and threw a second one one top.  Cut a few slits in the top and tossed it in the oven at 350 for about 35 minutes.  I think I put some more butter on and broiled it for a few minutes just to brown the top.




As you can see, it turned out to be a nice hearty meal!  I think everyone enjoyed it and with a few modifications (like adding some maple syrup to the top and mixture) I think this might be a new favorite of mine.

Bon Appetit!

2 comments:

That's so awesome - I love that you hacked tourtiere! It's a family tradition of ours actually, that mom used to make a very traditional tourtiere for Christmas eve. And when I was still a meat eater I loved the shit out of that pie. As a vegetarian I tried a couple veggie tourtiere recipes but nothing even came close to the savoury steaminess of mom's meat recipe. Looks super great Marko! So does the tree! Nice work.

It was delicious. A meal you can keep making and inviting us down for!!