Pasties

I was recently reminded of pasties by one of my friends, who is from Montana and hasn't had them in a long time. Not the pasties that you wear, but the ones that you eat. :) They are a meat-filled pie, that was passed down from Cornish miners, and are very prevalent in most areas with mining history. The miners would take a pasty with them, and heat them up on shovels using a candle for heat. The area that I lived in Minnesota was on the Iron Range and mining is a big industry there. I only had pasties a few times while I was there and helped to make them once. So I didn't have a very strong foundation to go from. But the internet is a wonderful thing, and I found this web resource that had a bunch of recipes:
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~awesley5155/pastie.html

I combined elements from several of them, and used a picture from http://www.pasty.com/ to see how the pastry should be folded. Pie crusts have never been my strong suit, but Madelyne Lawry's recipe on the first link had a very good pie crust. It even survived my fumbling around with it, and for the most part turned out really good. This is in spite of the fact that I realized that I left my rolling pin up in North Carolina, so I had to use the bamboo utensil holder in the kitchen to roll out the dough. Just goes to show that you don't need to have a lot of high priced equipment to make good food. :) Needless to say I stopped by Linens N' Things and picked up a new wooden french rolling pin for future pasty needs. :)