meat pie

The other day I made a meat pie for dinner, with a new method. The base ingredients were ground beef (sometimes I use leftover steak diced up), an onion, one red potato, two carrots, a bay leaf and some Thyme.

Oh, and a can of vegetable beef soup. For the filling as usual I sautee the onion and carrot in butter, add and brown the beef, add the fresh veggies. Whisk a bit of flour into the filling to thicken it.and simmer with the soup and herbs while I make the crust.

The new part was baking it in a cast iron skillet put into the oven, instead of the usual glass pie pan. I adjusted my usual recipe a bit following this as a guideline. I baked it at 375° for 45 minutes and it came out perfect.

It came out looking wonderful and had a richer flavor than usual. I'm not sure if this is because I substituted a bit of butter in my crust, having run low on shortening, or if it's because the skillet seeped some flavor into the pie...

I can justify putting this on my garden blog because it had one ingredient from last years' garden: dried Thyme!