My Family’s Comfort Food: Meat Pie

The other day I asked my family what special dinner they would like for Valentine’s Day. The answer was quite surprising! The unanimous decision? Meatpie. When I was a kid, I always wanted my mom to make her meat pie for me. I’ve never seen the same recipe anywhere else. In fact, we didn’t even have a recipe until I wrote it down as we made it last night. It’s not a fancy dinner and is actually pretty inexpensive to make. But in our family nothing says “love” like a belly full of comfort food. So today I share with you our family recipe. Tinker with it and make it your own. I don’t think I have made it the exact same way twice!

Meat Pie Recipe
(make 2 pies, approximately 10 servings)

Ingredients:

2 frozen pie shells
1 to 1.5 pounds ground sirloin or beef (90/10 or 80/20)
1/2 cup of potato flakes
1 T Worcestershire Sauce
2 T dried onions
1/2 cup shredded cheese
10-14 servings of mashed potatoes (instant, frozen, or homemade)

Instructions:

Pre-heat oven to 350 and pierce pie crusts all over with a fork. Mix the ground beef, potato flakes, onion, and Worcestershire sauce together. Divide and press half into each pie crust. Bake for 20 minutes.

While they are baking, prepare your mashed potatoes. It is totally up to you whether you want to use instant potatoes from flakes, a prepared frozen mashed potato bowl, or homemade mashed potatoes. I tend to use instant because they bake again anyway.

Remove the pies from the oven when they look like this and have no red inside:

Next, divide the mashed potatoes and top each pie with half. Push the potatoes down until it is a nice thick mound. Increase the oven to 425 degrees and bake for 25 minutes. The peaks of the potatoes should be just starting to brown a little at that point. Remove from the oven and top each with 1/4 cup of cheese. It should look like this:

Bake for about 5 more minutes, just long enough to melt the cheese. Remove from the oven and let rest about 10 minutes before you try to cut them so that they do not fall apart. Or if you are like my family, just dig in as fast as you can.

Here’s what the final product looks like. We always eat it with corn (and 3/4 of us put ketchup on it).

Meat pie has become a favorite in our family for celebrating special occasions. We even have a Meat Pie song that we sing. “We’re having meat pie. ‘Cuz it’s my birthday. We’re having meat pie…” Strangely enough, although we have been singing it for more than 10 years, the tune is almost identical to the Steak Night song from Scrubs! Watch the video, insert our words, and then consider making Meat Pie for your family some night.