The Meat Pies

It is becoming quite embarrassing to pretend to great culinary skills when lately all I do turns to disaster. Unfortunately, with the Christmas season generally comes a great deal of cooking. It is at that time of the year that we all expect homemade traditional dishes and delicacies.

Last weekend, the task ahead was making tourtière, a meat pie originating from Quebec. It really is just a pie filled with ground pork, beef and game, onions and spices. It is a deliciously fragrant and savory dish especially anticipated during the Christmas celebrations. But a good tourtière has its secrets; a mystery ingredient, a superstitious order of assembly, a special mold. It’s one of those things. Every family has their own – original - recipe, passed down through generations. Marco’s mother gave me hers last year. I guess it makes me family now.

On that Sunday morning, I had seven tourtières to make. No one ever makes one single tourtière. It’s unheard of. By definition, tourtière is an assembling dish, made with the expectation that they will be shared with others. Therefore quantity is in order.

Generally speaking, tourtière is an easy dish to make, fairly straightforward. I made the filling, the dough, assembled the pies, covered with top pastry, pressed the edges to seal, cut decorative shapes from the remaining pastry and arranged them all in a pretty pattern on top, brushed the pastry with an egg mixture to make it all shiny, and baked for 45 minutes. The result was splendid. A row of hot and golden brown tourtières was cooling down on the kitchen counter.

My work was done. It was time to relax. I made myself a nice cup of tea, put on Benny Goodman, grabbed a book, sat next to my cat and stroked her gently behind the ears. The couch was bathing in sunrays. It was pure heaven. That is, until all hell’s broke lose. A loud – KABOOM - made us both jump out of our skin, startled, confused, and eventually panicked. I nearly scalded my cat to death when I dropped my hot steaming tea all over her. It remains unclear whether the noise or the hot water set her running across the apartment as if her life depended on it, making a trail of hot sweet tea on every carpet and pieces of furniture along the way. Her tail was apparently rather soaked as it splashed tea on the walls and ceiling like arterial blood in horror movies. In her desperation to get away she had knocked over a plate of biscotti’s which landed on the floor. Although the biscotti’s completely crumbled to pieces, the plate did not break until I actually stepped on it. In my race to catch up to my cat, I failed to notice that I had cut my foot, pretty deep. Eventually, I found her sitting on the bed, drying herself off. Apparently calm, cool and collected. A quick check revealed nothing to worry about. She was fine. That’s when I noticed the blood, my blood. It crossed my mind that I may faint and bleed to death; thankfully I managed to tend to it on time. How I found the strength is beyond comprehension, I get feeble at the mere sight of blood. Although it was pretty clear that I might need stitches and a better bandage than my grey sweatshirt, I was more concerned by the fact that it may upset my plans to wear my brand new heels at the office party the following week.

It’s only when I returned to the kitchen to get a bucket of hot soapy water and a sponge that the origin of the commotion became clear. It turned out that the – KABOOM – in question was generated by all seven tourtières exploding at once. There was ground meat everywhere. As if someone had splashed walls, cupboards and ceiling with molten porridge. To make matters worst that was exactly the moment Marco chose to knock at the door. Surprised, but not overly bewildered, he kindly suggested he’d come back later.

Back in the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of myself in the microwave door. In an attempt a brushing off my hair, I had put blood on my forehead, my mascara probably splashed by hot tea was running down my cheek, my hair was disheveled and a piece of wet dough was caught in it, I looked slightly possessed. Yet, I had not lost my cool.

Meticulous investigations revealed that I may have neglected to cut steam vents on the top dough…

By dinner time, all traces of the slaughter had been removed. I had to part with my favorite sweater, but otherwise all was quite fine. Exhausted, I grabbed my book, aimed for the couch, and sat straight into a puddle of tea. Darn.