Back in February, I entered a contest and won a spot on The Hampton Roads Show cooking THE comfort food in my family – Pasty. It’s a meat, potato and onion pie wrapped in crust and baked. Many ethnicities have their own version of this including Spanish Empanadas, Pakistani Shepard’s’ Pie, German Bierocks, Indian Keema Samosa, and so on. Most are hand-held meals in and of themselves.
My father was the 11th child (of 12) born to Finnish immigrants who arrived in America shortly after the turn of the 19th century and lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near the Canadian border. Most of the men either worked cutting timber or mining iron and needed a substantial meal to take with them, thus the Finnish Pasty as I know it. There are pasty shops in that area today that follow the same pattern.
My Finnish grandmother passed away just weeks begore I was born, but there were plenty of Finnish sisters-in-law to teach my mom this traditional recipe. She always had some tucked away in the freezer as she made them in batches of 18 or 20 at a time. They are as good from the freezer as a chicken pot pie, and as comforting too, especially if you start it in the microwave and finish it off in a hot oven to crisp up the crust just right!
The funny part of this story is that, as excellent of a cook I have become over the years, I had never made pasty before this contest for 3 reasons: it’s a lot of work peeling and dicing all of those potatoes into small pieces; I had no experience making crust because I rarely needed it; and it’s a lot of work dicing up all of those potatoes. I really dislike peeling and dicing 3 or 4 pounds of potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes for some reason. Besides, when my mom passed, my twin brother took over filling the freezer and I didn’t have to make them. 😊
So, I spent a week practicing making crust, switching between butter, Crisco, lard, and mixtures of the three. Then, in my O.C.D. fashion, I experimented with different ratios of meat, potatoes, and onions until it was just right! When I was a teen-ager, we had some hard days when there were way more potatoes from the garden than meat, but it never mattered as long as there was ketchup.
Lots of people ate pasty that week and the segment went well with Andy by my side and Michelle in the wings. What a fun day!
(As a professional chef, she wasn’t allowed to participate, but it was still great to have her there. It had been a long time since the three of us were working in a tv studio together…)