Louisiana meat pies

Every time we drive home to Alexandria, Louisiana for a visit, we make sure to take a pit stop in Natchitoches.  There are several places that sell meat pies.  We grab a few and hop back in the car and munch on them  for the last hour of our drive home.

We also pack a cooler to bring home frozen meat pies back to Texas.  For the fourth of July celebration at the lake I decided to try small appetizer sized meat pies.  I used two of my favorite cookbooks and combined the recipes.  Louisiana Entertains, by far, my favorite cookbook of all time.  The recipes are presented by an entire meal or party.  Need 200 mini meat pies, they will tell you how!  Cane River Cuisine is another favorite of mine.  They both had perfect recipes.  My substitutions to the recipe are below.

The above mini pies are some of the rejects not pretty enought to make the cut that I baked for the family to try.  The other 6 dozen, I froze on a cookie sheet for two hours and then bagged them up, three dozen to a bag,  and returned them to the freezer.  

 The meat...

 The recipe called 7 cups of flour to make the dough.  I substituted refrigerator ready pie crusts. because I was lazy  I used a 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter.  I was able to get 12 mini's out of one pie crust and almost two dozen more out of the leftover dough pieces.  I used four pie crusts.  I needed at least four more to use all the meat mixture.  But, spaghetti meat sauce will be wonderful for dinner tonight!

 The pies...

I baked a few to taste, maybe I think I should have let them brown a bit more.  But, they smelled so good and I was hungry.

Next time I make these, I am asking my best friend to bring a bottle of wine and four rolls of dough and it will be a group effort.  It is tedious loading those little dough circles with the meat mixture.  Girl talk and wine will definitely make this little project more fun!

My adjustments below from the Louisiana Entertains Cookbook recipe.

Purchased pie crusts

finely diced peppers and green onion

1 pound ground beef 1 pound ground pork

I couldn't find Chef Boyardee sauce mix (cookbook 1980's)

I did find two packages of generic dry spaghetti sauce mix

No olives or jalapeno peppers (will add peppers next time)

1/2 teaspoon red pepper, heavy sprinkle of granulated garlic and black pepper

1/2 teaspoon of meat mixture is all that I could fit in my little circles of dough

Louisiana Entertains, 1984 is out of circulation.  

I found some for you used on Amazon.

The Harvest Coffee party recipes pictured above serves 100

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