36: Tourtière (pork pot pie)

It’s nice to find recipes that I already have all the ingredients for. Tourtière (from Cooking Light magazine) is one of those recipes. It’s basically a pork pot pie with cinnamon, cloves, and red pepper. The combination of those spices with pork, in a Western dinner, was intriguing, so I decided to try it.

I didn’t measure the vegetables as it said to, primarily because I didn’t know what I would do with the extra carrot and celery. I used one carrot, half a stalk of celery, two smallish potatoes, and an onion. I also omitted chives. Otherwise, I followed the recipe as stated and the filling came together properly. I don’t have ramekins didn’t remember that I had ramekins I could unbox to use, so I decided to adapt it into a pie.

Rather than buy a pie crust, I made one. I was rushing to get it together as I was cooking the filling. This is seldom a good idea, and led to a pretty messy kitchen. I skipped the step of refrigerating the dough to get it to meld. I rolled it out immediately instead, and so it didn’t roll out as smoothly and evenly as it usually would. My pie pan is shallow and the filling wouldn’t fit, so I used a shallow Corningware dish instead. Since the crust didn’t roll out perfectly, I tore off extra pieces and patched them on to cover the filling completely.

Tourtiere

The dish was pretty shallow, and I thought this yielded an awfully high crust-to-filling ratio. The recipe actually called for using half of the pie crust dough for ramekins, so the full crust I used (and that they recommended for a full pie) does change the dynamics a little bit. I wish that I had put the filling in a deep casserole dish and placed a small (-er) pie crust round in the center, kind of like an island, so that the filling and not the crust was the star of the dish. [I actually have small pie crusts in the freezer for apple dumplings and individual cobblers, so I really, really wish I had done this instead.]

Tourtière for one

Alex really enjoyed this. This is a vaguely sweet dish from the addition of cinnamon and cloves (Cooking Light describes the dish as figgy), and I generally am not a huge fan of sweet dinners. While I liked this, I don’t think that I would want to eat it very often. I might make it again, though, with less crust.