New Year Pie

[kambriel]

First meal of the new year :)

Potato pies w/spinach, alfredo sauce, portobello mushroom, black & red pepper, garlic & thyme. A warm, savoury start to 2011.

After it baked most of the way through, I sprinkled the top with some grated parmesan, and encircled the crust with black olives, and some little dabs of colby jack cheese.

Off to eat!





Recipe-wise, I made it all up along the way. I did have to improvise after realizing I didn't have certain "basic" ingredients on hand. For instance, the mashed potatoes normally require milk (I'd have used soy milk) and water, but I didn't have the soy milk on hand. I thought of what else I could do, and chose to use half a jar of alfredo pasta sauce in its place, along with portobello mushroom soup for added moisture. I'm glad I had to do this, because all of the flavours melded together seamlessly into something ~truly delicious~. This also kept the potatoes very thick, rich and flavourful, a perfect filling for the pies!

Ingredients:

Pillsbury pie crusts (2)
1 small box of Condensed Portobello Mushroom soup (from Trader Joe's)
1 box Garlic Mashed potatoes (Whole Foods)
1/2 jar Alfredo Sauce (Trader Joes)
1/3 of a stick of butter
1 can spinach

Seasonings:
Thyme (just sprinkled some in my palm)
Black Pepper (I wanted it to have a good warmth/kick, so I added a decent amount of "what looked right")
Red Pepper flakes (several shakes worth)

Topping:
Grated Parmesan
sliced black olives
extra cheese (I used colby jack) if desired for crust

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

First, I brought approx. 3 1/2 cups water (with a little sprinkle of sea salt) to a boil in a large pot, with the butter added in ~ melting as the water heated up. Then you remove the boiling water from the heat, and pour the potato flakes in (the box had two packets in it, I used both), quickly adding in the mushroom soup and alfredo sauce and give it a good stir to integrate everything while it's still nice and hot. At this point, you can also add the black and red pepper flakes, thyme, and any other herbs you might like ~ stirring it all together.

Put the lid back on the pot, and let it sit for a few minutes while thoroughly hand-squeezing out the moisture from the spinach (too much moisture isn't good for the crust). Pinch off little dollops of the spinach and drop them into the pot of potatoes, stirring it all together again.

Roll out the pie crust into a pie dish (one per pie). Fill it up with the potato mixture (half of the mixture for each pie), smoothing the top out a bit once you're done, and gently rolling over the top edges of the dough. You could pinch it into little scallops, but I just wanted a rustic "enveloped" look.

I'm pretty sure after putting these in the oven, I set the timer for 15 minutes, but after about 10, it looked good, so I pulled them out and sprinkled some grated parmesan on top, and ringed it with sliced black olives and added some little pieces of colby jack cheese near the edge of the crust. This is where you'd generally add foil to the edge of the crust to keep it from burning, but I wanted to try something else, and it worked perfectly ~ kept the crust from browning/drying out too much, while adding even more flavour.

At this point, I put the pies back in the oven for a few more minutes (maybe 4-5), basically, I peeked in and saw the cheese on the edge of the crust bubbling, and c'est finis :)

Then patiently (this is the hard part), let it cool for 10 minutes or so... and devour!

Normally, I'd suggest other options for what could be used, but this tastes about 100 times better than the photo looks, so I'm just listing it exactly as they were made :)

~ Kambriel

[Kambriel.com ~ Etsy ~ Bluesky]

Comments

[tadesignsbynya.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that it will, I'll let you know when I get to try it :)