Beef and Sweet Potato Hand Pies
Description
This is another one of those recipes that I’m posting so that I remember to make some once in a while. If you’re using store-bought puff pastry, and you have your filling ready to go, a fun weekend lunch is less than a half hour away. Make up your own filling! – that’s what I’ll be doing…this idea is borrowed from Real Simple’s Cookbook, ‘Dinner Tonight: done!’. I actually doubled the filling, used a thawed 300 g package of frozen spinach, and then froze a container for quesadillas the following week – enjoy!
Ingredients
Beef and Sweet Potato Hand Pies
1/2 lb. ground beef
2–4 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 t. EACH salt AND freshly ground pepper
2–3 c. chopped fresh spinach
3/4 c. (packed) cooked (leftover!) sweet potato, mashed or finely diced
1 package (2 sheets/10″ x 10″), thawed in the fridge overnight
1/2–3/4 c. grated old cheddar
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 400 and line a large baking sheet with parchment. Heat up a bit of oil in a large skillet and cook it, breaking it up as you go, until there is no pink visible. Stir in the garlic, salt and pepper and cook for a minute or 2 more then add in all of the spinach and cook as required to make sure most of the liquid has evaporated and the spinach has wilted.
Remove the skillet from the heat, add in the sweet potato and give it a good stir to make sure it’s evenly dispersed. Assembly, and the use of puff pastry, works best if the filling isn’t very hot so if you’re not able to make the filling ahead, make sure your leftover potatoes are cold, this will speed things up. Stir in as much cheddar as you’d like.
Lay both sheets of pastry on a lightly floured surface and cut each in half to form 4 rectangles. Add a good scoop of filling onto 1 side of each rectangle, leaving a 1/4-inch border (you may not be able to fit it all into 4 hand pies), then fold the pastry over and press to seal all edges firmly. Transfer to your baking sheet (or prepare them on your baking sheet!), and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden. Cutting each square into triangles to serve, this makes them easier to eat…and helps to cool them off.
- Category: Ground Beef, Puff Pastry
