Butternut Squash Pasties

ahem - Pronounced PASS-tee, has nothing to do with the burlesque adornment nor is it like glue.

The pasty is a traditional meat pie/sandwich (basically a homemade hot pocket) that originated in Cornwall, England. If you're interested in more history you can read about it here. It comes into my family by way of Escanaba, Michigan where immigrants from Cornwall and Finland settled and made them popular. My grandmother grew up there and, this past weekend, she was in town. She, my mom and I made some U.P. style pasties.



I then modified the recipe to suit my tiny kitchen. I am not really equipped to make pastry from scratch (and anyway, this blog is all about EASY) so I substituted crescent roll dough. The result was flaky and fluffy as you'd expect from a crescent. Yummy, but not ideal for hand-held consumption as a pie crust might be.

Here's the original filling recipe (from memory)
3 lbs potatoes, peeled and diced
2 cups diced carrot
2 cups diced rutabaga
2 cups diced onion
1 lb ground meat
salt and pepper
your own pie crust recipe

Mix all ingredients together. Dough should be rolled out to about 10 inch ovals and filled with the (raw) filling mixture. Fold dough over and pinch edges together. Bake at 350 for 1 hour. Makes at least 10 pasties. (actually, now that I think about it, we made 10 and still had half of the filling leftover. And we didn't use nearly 3 lbs of potatoes.)


My recipe (a work in progress)
4 smallish yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1/2 butternut squash, peeled and diced
1/4 sweet onion, diced
1/2 lb ground beef
salt and pepper
a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove
2 rolls of crescent roll dough

Note: I precooked the filling because I knew the crescent roll dough would burn if in the oven for an hour.

Cook meat in a skillet. Drain off some of the fat if there is a lot. Add the remaining ingredients to the skillet and stir to combine. Let cook for just a couple minutes. Roll out dough so that you have 8 rectangles total (made up of 2 triangles each). Place about a half cup of the filling onto on corner of each rectangle, fold over the other side and pinch the edges together. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.


My next experiment will be a vegetarian version and possibly a dessert version. Stay tuned for those recipes!