Happy Passover!

Normally I try to avoid Passover recipes that try to replicate the things that I'm giving up eating for the week. The rolls, brownies, cookies, etc. just never taste as good as the real thing and it hardly seems worth the calories when there are plenty of good things that you can eat. Of course even with the determination each year to eat salads, simple meals, and embrace the hundreds of things you can eat, I invariably end up craving bread halfway through. It's more surprising because I don't eat bread on a regular basis.
This year, I invited company over and decided to see what I could do about making some sort of kosher for Passover pie.

Passover Turkey and Potato Pie
Crust:
4 Matzos
2 Eggs
1/2 cup of matzo meal
1 tsp Thyme
8 Tbs of parve (non dairy) margarine
salt to taste

Wet matzos, break into tiny pieces into a bowl. Melt margarine. Add eggs, margarine, spices and matzo meal to bowl. Mix together. Press into a 10" pie plate.

Filling:
1 lb ground turkey
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic1/2 cup of frozen peas
2 Tbs. mushroom soup stock base (I use the Israeli brand Osem, you could use any sort of stock)
1 cup of water
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp olive oilpotato starch (if needed)
salt and pepper

Brown onion in olive oil with the garlic, add turkey and additional spices and cook through. Add water and soup stock base (or plain stock if using that) and frozen peas. Cook until peas are tender. If the filling is too liquid, stir in potato starch until it thickens. Put in matzo pie crust.

Topping:
4 medium sized potatos, boiled
2 cloves of garlic
1 tsp parsley
3 tbs water
2 tbs margarine

Boil potatoes and then mash with additional ingredients until smooth enough to spread on top of pie. Bake assembled pie in preheated oven for 30 minutes (or until potatoes start to brown on top) at 375 degrees.
The pie reheats really well which is an extra bonus! Luckily I have just enough left to make it through these last few days even if I will be dreaming of an Italian dinner all the while.

More Thanksgiving...

Academic life got in the way of posting more pie photos, but here are some details on the rest of the savory pies from Thanksgiving.

Turkey, broccoli, stuffing pie

This might have been the easiest pie I made, but also one of my favorites. I sauteed the turkey breast at the same time as for the other turkey pie. I used store bought stuffing for the top and a regular butter crust for the bottom. The filling is made up of sauteed broccoli, garlic, the cooked turkey and a can of store bought gravy. I imagine the whole thing would improve if you made the gravy and stuffing from scratch, but for a quick pie this was really good.

Corn Pie

I don't know why but I really wanted to make a corn pie. I think its because Thanksgiving has always included buttered steam in the bag corn. This recipe calls for a cracker crust, which gives me hope for attempting cookie and graham cracker crusts in the future. Recipe can be found here.

Brussels Sprout and Leek Quiche
I adapted this recipe from here as follows:

1 tablespopon butter
1/2 chicken stock
1 leek chopped (white and green parts)
1 pint of Brussels sprouts
2 garlic cloves minced
2 spring onions chopped
1 Tbs herbs de provence
approx. 5 oz. of chive and onion cream cheese
1 cup Gruyere cheese
6 eggs
salt
pepper
1 butter pie shell

Combine first seven ingredients in a pan and saute until tender. Let cool and then stir in cream cheese. Add grated cheese, eggs, salt and pepper. Pour into unbaked pie shell and cook for 40 min at 375 degrees.

The whole thing was baked in a silicon tart pan which worked beautifully this time and let me slide the quiche out and put it on my pretty cake stand.

Dessert pie descriptions soon!

Thanksgiving: Turkey Pie with Chive Mashed Potatoes

The filling was made up of sauteed turkey breast, celery, carrot, mushrooms and peas. I also added some chicken stock and heavy cream. It's seasoned with sage, salt and pepper. I put that in a regular butter crust bottom crust.

The top is made up of chive mashed potatoes. I used 8 small potatoes, mashed with a little more cream and butter and then about two tablespoons of chopped chives. It turned out to be the perfect amount to put on top of the pie. The potatoes had cooled somewhat when i spread them on top of the pie. I baked the whole thing about 40 minutes. It probably would have been good to let the top brown a bit longer, but I had lots of other pies to bake that day.

Happy Independance Day!

So after my pie posting frenzy, I'm now more or less caught up and can post pie and other domestic projects as they happen.

I had friends over for pie experimentation tonight. Since I had ground turkey in the freezer I wanted to use, I perused the internet and decided to make my own variant on turkey meatball pie. Let's state for the record that even though this may use ground turkey instead of ground beef it is in no way healthy for you.

I made a simple butter pie crust recipe and doubled it so I have dough in the fridge to make more pie later this week. For those keep tracking that means 1 1/3 cups of butter (for the four pie crusts) and 4 cups of flour. Plus a bit of water. The turkey meatballs I made with ground turkey, salt, pepper fresh thyme and one egg. Then I fried them in butter. (I told you it wasn't healthy). After I added fresh celery and mushrooms and frozen peas, carrots and pearl onions. Some heavy cream to add to it, water and some more spices (rosemary, more thyme, parsley). Then I cooked the whole thing for about 40 minutes. I should have thickened the filling a bit more than I did, but it was still pretty tasty. I think next time I'd stick to traditional chicken pot pie, or maybe just use the ground turkey loose instead of going to the trouble of meatballs.

In the meantime I also made chocolate chip cookies. I would choose to bake on a hot day. Thank goodness for the air conditioner!

But the best part of making pie today was that I got to use both my new stainless steel measuring cups that I got yesterday and the pie server I picked up. I leave you with this obvious statement: It really is much easier to serve pie with an actual pie server and not a steak knife.