Brianna's Bridies

“Bridies! Hot bridies!” A high-pitched screech cut through the rumble and racket of the hall, and Brianna turned to see an old woman elbowing her way robustly through the crowd, a steaming tray hung round her neck and a wooden spatula in hand. The heavenly scent of fresh hot dough and spiced meat cut through the other pungencies in the hall, noticeable as the old woman’s calling. It had been a long time since breakfast, and Brianna dug in her pocket, feeling saliva fill her mouth.
 -- Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

Brianna knew what she was doing when she bought meat pies on the dock. Giantess or not, one will simply not do.

My friend Kathy uses the word "Yummalicious!" which is a perfect description of these meat pies. Made with the Short Crust Pastry the inside is a perfect blend of meat, vegetable, and butter. The recipe in the book is separated into vegetarian and meat bowls - the recipe says this will make four of each using a packed 1/2 cup of filling in each pie.  Hubster likes his pizza with veggies and meat, this is no exception, so it all gets mixed together. We used carrots, turnip, onion, fresh thyme from the garden and about 1/2 the butter called for in the recipe. The first time I made this I used ground turkey. The minced steak was much better. Pain in the a$$ to cut, but worth the trouble.

Directions say to cut 6" rounds from the rolled dough and use a packed 1/2 cup of filling. As I said before, you're supposed to have eight pies when done. I had twelve. I'm going to experiment with rolling out the rounds of dough a bit more and try to get it down to 10 bridies in all.

School news.  It's getting easier, but universities need to rethink the "give a link to a newspaper article to read" angle.  Most of their articles are behind paywalls and I normally reach my limit of available articles by the 5th of the month.  Yes, I'm using several different machines, so I get more, but I still reach the limit.  All of my homework was posted by 9pm last night - that's good, but I don't have time to read all the articles assigned and I feel like I'm not writing as well as I should.  I think some of these people are only taking one class at a time so it's not as hard for them.  I know why they want us to interact with four postings each week, but I'm still having issues doing so.  I love the creativity class - we had to write a personal memoir, which was easy, but it was limited to 250-300 words.  I spent more time trying to edit down to the limit than I did writing it out.  Was a bit pissy when I saw some didn't even try to edit their work - 450 words are just too damn many.  As an old PM told me once, "You do you. Don't worry about them."

Good advice about a lot of things in life.