Almost Aussie Pie

I managed to make good headway last week on the information system proposal and bid.  I wasn't able finish it, but I have enough data to wrap it up, hopefully this week.  For that reason, future post may be sporadic rather than daily, at least for the nonce.  Thanks for bearing with me.

Okay, then.  I've titled this post Almost Aussie Pie because, while the result tasted good, it really wasn't Aussie Pie.  Actually, it tasted more like pie-shaped Cornish Pasties, but that's a recipe for another time.  Anyhow, here's the recipe I used.

Almost Aussie Pie

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2 lb eye-of-round (beef) roast.
1 large Spanish or yellow onion, rough chopped (1/2-inch dice).
1 carrot, sliced crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick pieces.
1 celery stalk, sliced crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick pieces.
2 packages store-bought 9-inch pie crusts (enough for 2 pies with top and bottom crusts).
2 heaping T all-purpose flour.
3 bay leaves.
1/4 t whole mustard seeds.
6 C tap-water.
Seasoned Salt.
Black pepper.
Onion powder.
Garlic powder.
Vegetable oil.
Cooking spray (aerosol vegetable oil).

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Coat all surfaces of the roast liberally with the seasoned salt, black pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.

Pour enough vegetable oil into a heavy skillet.  Over HIGH heat, sear all surfaces of the coated roast.

Place the roast in a pressure cooker.  Add the water, carrots, celery,1/4 of the chopped onions, bay leaves, and mustard seeds.  Cook (according to the
instructions for your pressure cooker) for 1 hour.  When you're done, remove the roast from the pressure cooker (keep the cooking liquid and vegetables - you'll use them to make gravy) and let cool.  Shred the roast, then chop the shreds into 1/4- to 1/2-inch pieces.

Note: If you don't own a pressure cooker, you can get the same results using a Dutch oven and more time.  Just follow the directions for pressure cooking, but put the ingredients in a Dutch oven.  Then braise in your oven at 350 degrees for 3-4 hours, or until the roast is tender enough to shred.

While the roast is cooking, place the remaining chopped onions in the skillet you used to sear the roast, and sweat them over LOW heat until they're translucent.  Remove onions from skillet and reserve.  When the onions have cooled sufficiently to be handled comfortably, mix them, using your hands, with the shredded and chopped meat.

Reduce the cooking liquid, by boiling, to a generous 2 cups in volume (here's where I screwed up, incidentally - I blended before I had reduced the liquid, which action resulted in the Kitchen Katastrophe I described in detail earlier).

Remove the bay leaves and discard.  Allow reduced liquid to cool, then pour the reduced cooking liquid, along with the vegetables and mustard seeds, into a blender and blend until the vegetable are pureed.

Into the same pan you used to sear the roast and sweat the onions, pour 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  Mix the flour thoroughly in the oil to form a paste, and cook gently, over LOW heat, stirring constantly with a wire whisk, until the oil-flour mixture turns the color of peanut butter.  Remove pan from heat and let cool. (Congratulations! you've just made a roux, considered by many to be a bane of home cooks.)

Into the cooled roux, pour the cooled reduced liquid/pureed vegetable mixture.  Place over LOW heat, and whisk, constantly but gently, in order to incorporate the roux and cooking liquid.  Be patient, because this may take awhile.

As the mixture cooks, your constant whisking breaks up any lumps of roux that may have formed.  Also, the mixture begins to thicken.  When the mixture is thick enough to just coat the back of a spoon, your gravy's ready to make Almost Aussie Pie.  Don't be concerned that your gravy is too thin.  It will continue to thicken in the course of baking, the next step.

Spray cooking oil into two 9-inch (preferably non-stick) pie tins.  Following package instructions, place a sheet of crust dough in the bottom of each tin.  Using a fork, make holes in the dough to prevent steam pockets from forming between crust and tin while baking.

Place half of the meat/onion mixture in each tin and arrange evenly.

You should have at least two cups of warm gravy.  If not, add warm water until you have 2 cups, and mix thoroughly (you have enough roux to thicken two cups of gravy).  Pour half of the gravy (1 cup plus) evenly over the filling of each pie.

Following package instructions, apply a top crust to each pie.  Be sure to crimp the top and bottom crust together to prevent leakage.  Also, be sure to cut vent holes in the top crust to prevent steam pockets from forming as the filling cooks.  If you don't vent the top crust, your pie can explode in the oven (actually, it'll only look like it exploded, if you're lucky; in any case, it will not be pretty).

Brush (or spray) top crusts with vegetable oil (or you may also use dollops of butter or margerine).

Place pie tins on cookie sheet (to catch any pie filing that oozes out during baking) and bake as directed by the instructions printed on the pie-crust package.  Alternatively, or if the package your pie crust came in doesn't have printed baking instructions, you can bake at 350 to 375 degrees for about an hour, or until the top crust is golden brown.  In either case, you may want to cover the crust over the seam between the top and bottom crusts with aluminum foil to prevent this area of crust from scorching (don't cover the entire top).  You should remove the foil when you think the pies have 20 to 30 minutes of baking time left.

As with most pies, it's not a good idea to slice or serve these pies immediately after removal from the oven.  Don't let them cool to room temperature, but do let them cool some before slicing and serving.

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Well, there you have it, for what it's worth.  A visually attractive and tasty pie, but genuine Aussie Pie it ain't.  In a future post, I'll give you a recipe for the real McCoy.

Happy cooking!

My Apologies

Due to the time required to research and create a proposal and bid to develop a custom automated information system for a potential client (my 'day job'), I will not be posting entries this week.  We'll take up Aussie Pie again next Monday, 10/12/2009.  Until then . . .

Happy cooking!

Aussie Pie - Anatomy of a Kitchen Disaster

When I signed off yesterday, I fully intended to give you the ingredients and details of preparation of Aussie Pie.  However, after cleaning up yesterday the mess in my kitchen I'd made the day before, I've had a change of heart.  I made a really huge mess, you see, and I think it's incumbent on me to discourage any attempts at emulation.  At any rate, we'll take up Aussie Pie again in due time.

Now, I know you're not really curious about the kitchen clean-up I was compelled to perform yesterday after submitting my post, but I'm going to talk about it, anyway.  My purpose is to tell a horror story, in hopes that it will discourage you from cooking when you're tired, and to give you a concrete example of the cost, in terms of unnecessary and entirely avoidable work, of culinary mental mistakes.

As you'll recall, I, in the throes of an exhaustion-caused stupidity attack, overfilled my blender with scalding-hot gravy-makings, and when I 'shot the juice', figuratively speaking, to the blender, the blender responded in kind by shooting the juice, literally speaking, back at me and my immediate vicinity.  The indoor cloudburst that resulted, in and of itself, wouldn't have been much of a problem if the contents of the blender had only been clear liquid, but this, sadly, was not the case.

My gravy-makings, remember, had been pressure-cooked, and thus contained little pieces of eye-of-round roast, carrot, celery, and onions.  Well, after having been neglected all night and most of yesterday morning, these food particles could not have been stuck faster - to counter-tops, floors, appliances, etc. - if someone had used epoxy cement or crazy-glue to stick them.

It was, basically, one whopping Hell of a mess.  They were many in number, these food particles.  There must have been literally thousands - I do not jest - of these, stuck individually and in little clusters, onto surfaces throughout the kitchen (and beyond its confines, as well, it turned out).

And then, there was the grease.  Although a well trimmed eye-of-round roast doesn't have much external fat, more fat comes out when you pressure-cook one than you can shake a stick at.  Now, we all know that cooking fat in liquid form doesn't dissolve in water but floats on it instead, so what do you think happened when I poured my gravy-makings into the blender?  That's right, the fat floated to the top.  Then, when I turned on the blender, what happened?  Right again.  I wound up with not only food particles all over the place, but a boat-load of grease, too.

Feeling horrified yet?  No? well, just wait.  I've not yet described my clean-up ordeal.  If that doesn't scare you, nothing will.

Immediately after posting my article yesterday, I entered my kitchen, and on close inspection, discovered the extent of the mess.  My findings dismayed me, but knowing the job had to be done, I set to work.

First off, I collected cleaning supplies - kithen-cleaning liquid with grease-cutter, general-purpose cleaning liquid, mop and bucket, floor-cleaner, kitchen towels, paper towels, etc. Then the actual cleaning started.

I started with vertical surfaces, such as cabinet fronts and the sides of appliances.  My intention was to clean from top to bottom so that I wouldn't have to clean places more than once.

The refrigerator is in close proximity to where I had the blender positioned that fateful evening, and it was the grease spattered on its side that led to my discovery of how much grease I had to deal with.  Fortunately, although there was a lot of it, the grease was mostly in the area surrounding the scene of the accident.  The grease, being localized, was comparatively easy to clean.  This was a good thing, I thought, and I made reasonably quick work of it, although there was a gracious plenty of grease.

The grease, however, turned out to be the only blessing (if I dare call it that) in this sordid affair.  Grease was, in fact, only the tip of the iceberg.  It was while cleaning up the grease that I discovered the problem of the food particles.  This turned out to be worse than my worst nightmare.  The good news was, I discovered that I could get the glued-on food particles up.  The bad news, without expending considerably more than a little elbow grease, I'd have to apply the liquid to my target and wait for the cleanser to dissolve the 'glue'.  Either way, it would take time - lots of time - and not a little effort.

Anyway, after a little experimentation, I determined that less time, but more material, was consumed by spraying cleaner on a surface and letting the glue dissolve before wiping, and more time, but slightly less material, using the elbow-grease method.  For horizontal surfaces, I opted for the spray-wait-wipe method.

Vertical surfaces were another matter entirely. I didn't even bother trying the spray-wait-wipe method on vertical surfaces.  I'd be working against gravity using the spray-wait-wipe method, the problem coming in during the 'wait' stage, so the elbow-grease method was obviously the only effective way to clean these.

By the time I'd cleaned all the vertical surfaces and raised horizontal surfaces, I had been working for almost five hours.  I was pretty much beat by now, but I still had the floor to tackle.  This was not going to be easy, despite my having done a half-assed job of cleaning it the night before.  I had gotten up the liquid, you see, but I hadn't gotten up all of the food particles.  These food particles now were glued securely to the floor.  Trying to scrub the particles up, by using a mop, liquid floor cleaner, and brute force, would be a useless gesture, and besides, my reserves of brute force were low just now.  No, time and dissolving the glue were the only solutions, but Lordy! Lordy! was I tired (as well as sore, stiff, and fed up to here), and about half-past ready for this job to end.

Anyway, I persevered.  It took me some time to clean that floor, but clean it I did.  I laid down a generous amount of liquid floor cleaner, and then waited.  Every fifteen minutes or so, I did a little test mopping.  Finally, no food particles remained.

This final clean-up task wound up taking an hour to complete, so the duration of the entire job was about six hours.  I was utterly exhausted, for the second consecutive day, and I've been kicking myself ever since for being so stupid as to have caused it in the first place.

Moral of story? It's this: Please, please, please! never ever try to cook when you're tired - you're apt to regret it.  As the proverb says, What ye sow, also shall ye reap.  In cooking, however, it can be worse than that.  For the one mistake you sow, you often reap twice - you may very easily screw up your food (I got lucky and didn't, fortunately), and there likely will be a mess to clean up afterwards.

Happy cleaning - er, cooking!

The Aussie Pie Saga

Right off the bat, let me tell you that making Aussie Pie - making it the way I made it, at least - is not for the faint of heart.  The result was very good in the eating, but getting there was something else again.  Though I tried to make it easy for myself by using store-bought pie crusts, and by making two 9-inch pies and not the traditional smaller individual serving-size pies, there's only one phrase to describe my experience:  it was just nuts.  When the preparation was all over and done with, I had to enlist the aid of my wife to get the pies out of the oven.  I barely had enough energy left to eat.

The entire affair was a comedy of errors, and it was that way mostly on account of my decision to use a pressure-cooker.

Firstly, most Aussie Pie recipes that I've seen on-line specify coarse-ground beef.  Well, I didn't have any coarse-ground beef on hand, so I used a 2 1/2-pound eye-of-round roast.  Moreover, instead of cutting the roast into small cubes, browning the cubes, and then braising, as the few on-line recipes instruct, I thoroughly browned the intact roast, and then tossed it into my pressure-cooker.  The net result of this was that I had to cut the meat into cubes after it came out of the pressure-cooker.  This would have been a straightforward task and easily accomplished but for one thing.

It's like this.  Pressure-cookers cook quickly because the water that cooks the food - being prevented by the internal pressure, which builds up in the contraption when it's sealed and put on the fire, from turning into steam and boiling off - has a temperature much greater than 212 degrees, the sea-level boiling point of water.  The temperature's more like 250 to 275 degrees, and that's pretty darned hot.  This means that it takes longer for the food to cool to handling temperature, and when you add to that the cool-down time it takes for the cooker to cool down enough so you're not in danger of scalding yourself when you open it in order to get the food out, you're talking about a significant chunk of time.  When you add it all up, I think I'd have been better off time-wise to have cut that roast into cubes first, and then to have proceeded according the sensible instructions I listed earlier.

Secondly, all credible (i.e., submitted by Australian or New Zealander cooks) on-line Aussie Pie recipes specify Vegemite, which is a vegetable buillon in powder form, or some other form of concentrated vegetable flavoring.  Now, being in general a from-scratch cook, I don't keep vegetable buillon.  Thus in need of a substitute, I decided on mirepoix vegetables (carrots, celerey, and onion), which I cut roughly and placed in the pressure-cooker water.  The recipe I adapted (as well as all other Aussie Pie recipes I've come across) calls for gravy, and my intention was to make a gravy that incorporated the mirepoix vegetables.  My intent was to pour the cooking liquid, vegetables and all, into my trusty blender and make short work of pureeing the vegetables.  I do this routinely when I want to make a smooth gravy from vegetable-seasoned braising liquid, but this time it resulted in a minor 'kitchen katastrophe.'  It could easily have resulted in me being scalded, too.

Anyone who's used a blender knows better than to overfill it.  I know better, too.  My excuse for doing so is that I was momentarily impaired by an exhaustion-induced attack of the stupids.  And I wasn't only stupid, I was impatient, too - what with all the time I'd already spent - and I didn't let my cooking liquid cool sufficiently.  Talk about a recipe for disaster.

Bottom line, after reducing my vegetable-laden cooking liquid to one-half its original volume, I almost immediately poured too much of the still-too-hot liquid into my blender.  Then I turned the thing on, and all Hell broke loose.

Realizing from the start that I had overfilled the blender, my enfeebled mind decided that I'd be able to compensate by pushing down on the lid more forcefully than usual.  Well, as you've probably guessed, that did not one whit of good.  Not to say that my hand was forced up; it wasn't.  It's being there, in fact, probably prevented a worse disaster.

The lid stayed in the same place, right where it should have been, on top of the blender vessel, but it surely did not stay the same shape.  The force imparted to the liquid by the blender's impeller blades literally warped the pliable plastic lid, almost turning it inside out, and scalding-hot liquid flew all over the kitchen.  The floor, the counters, nearby appliances - everything within a radius of ten feet, including the upper torso of yours truly - was covered in gravy-makings.

I uttered appropriate blasphemies, of course.  Then I sighed, uttered some more, and set about giving clean-up the proverbial lick and promise while uttering still more.  The clean-up (at least) was necessary because the kitchen floor had been rendered too slippery for safe walking, and my labors were not yet complete.  At this point, I was ready to cry 'uncle'.  The truth be known, if I hadn't promised my wife Aussie Pie for dinner, I'd have said to Hell with it all, and we'd have had fast food for the evening meal.

Anyway the blender incident turned out to be the last mishap of my Aussie Pie misadventure, and I'm glad it was, because I don't think I could have handled another misfortune.  I managed to do a pretty good job with the store-bought pie crusts; I even remembered to take a fork to the bottom crusts to allow steam to escape during baking.  I put the Aussie Pies in the oven, and poured my self a glass of Pinot Noir.  And by godfrey, I thought I deserved it.

That's my post for today because I have to go and finish cleaning my kitchen.  If I'm lucky, that task will only take all afternoon.  Tomorrow, I'll publish the recipe I used, and the details of how I prepared my version of Aussie Pie (or, rather, the details of how I should have prepared it and will prepare it, if I decide to prepare it ever again).

Happy cooking!