Meat Pies | Gourmandistan

Nice precedent, damn quail

June 11, 2012 by Steve

Gourmandistan’s freezers hold some dark and shameful secrets, many of them involving foodstuffs not normally found in your mass market cookbooks. Steve’s penchant for odd bits of animals leads to small collections of things such as sweetbreads and pig feet, and Michelle’s lifelong hunter father often gifts us with undated and sometimes ill-described parts of former wildlife such as venison, wild turkey and pheasant and recently, two brace of quail. We appreciate and try to use every portion of meat […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Meat Pies, Old cookbooks, Quail, Recipes

Puff pastry meat pies and a mountain of lamb

March 2, 2011 by Michelle

We received delivery of our second annual lamb from our neighbors, Gary and Joyce Keibler, of Hemmer Hill Farm. This year the Keiblers wisely chose Marksbury Farm as the processor (where Steve took our chickens on their last day last Fall, chronicled here and here), avoiding our awkward acceptance of many strange bits and chunks along with the usual legs and chops. This year’s lamb could have leapt from an illustrated chart, with clearly identifiable shoulders, ribs and shanks. No […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Lamb, Meat Pies, Recipes • Tags: Locavore

Modernity vs. nostalgia vs. pot pie

January 16, 2011 by Michelle

While Gourmandistan’s borders are stuffed full of scanners, digital cameras, electronic readers and other delightful devices of our electronic age, our population still clings to print, especially when it comes to cooking. Shopping lists are usually written on scraps of paper (although Steve sometimes transcribes them to his iPhone). Our shelves groan with heavy cookbooks, which Michelle recently reorganized to make room for more. As we had a lot of leftover poultry flesh from Steve’s recent rescue of the little […]

Categories: Chicken, Cooking, Food, Meat Pies, Old cookbooks, Recipes