Family Fun

My sister and her family came to my place on Friday evening. We hit the pool right away and then had a late dinner, after which I put the adults to work on making pasties. Growing up in Michigan, pasties were a family favorite, and my sister and I are carrying on with the homemade tradition. It just takes A LOT of time and prep, and so I typically make them with my sister and her husband. Jonathan chopped up the meat, Barbara worked on cleaning and chopping up the carrots, potatoes and onion, and I supervised. I’m kidding. I was working hard, too. Honest! In fact, I starting making the pie dough around 4:30 PM before they arrived a couple hours later.

Basically a pastie is a meat pie you can hold in your hand. While in England, I was pleased to discover that pasties are English fare, and that back in the day, women would send their men off to work with these hearty pastries for their lunch. In the mines, the fields or wherever the men were for the lunch hour, they would pull out their pastie and gobble away, holding onto the braided crust with their unwashed hands. When they finished eating the filling and the crust up to where their fingers were, they would toss the crust away. This was before hand sanitizers, and so in a way, I suppose, this was their preventive way of not contaminating their food with their filthy hands. This whole scenario makes me laugh. In my opinion, the crust is the best part. I mean, yes, the steak, potatoes and carrots are tasty and delicious, but it is the crust that makes it all delectable, and yet, it was originally made to be discarded. Interesting!

We made over 40 pasties on Friday night and early Saturday morning. It was around 2:30 AM when my sister and I finally headed to bed. YIKES! But the tasty pasties were worth it. Despite their high Weight Watchers point value, I’ve sampled a couple since, and I have enjoyed every tantalizing morsel. YUM!