Cheap Bastid Cooks

I was watching “The Chew” a week or so ago and saw a piece on “Hand Pies”.  Now, to channel my inner George Carlin, a hand pie is a pie that you eat with your hand—“Thank you Captain Obvious!”

It’s made with regular pie crust but rather than putting the crust in a dish and then filling it and then topping it with more crust, you roll out the dough, cut it into rectangles put a couple of spoons full of filling on it, fold it, crimp it and then bake it.  What’s cool is that you can also freeze the pre-made hand-pies and pop them in the oven frozen sometime later.

This story on “The Chew” showed a restaurant in New York which specializes in “hand pies”.  Mario Batalli never mentioned how much the restaurant charges but I bet it’s somewhere in the $5-$8 range.  So I said to myself: “Self, you can do this yourself, easy and quick and cheap.”

In a certain sense these are kind of like Pop Tarts.  But the crust is a lot better because it’s pie crust rather than whatever it is that passes for the crust on a toaster pastry.  Don’t try these in the toaster, I don’t think they’d work quite right.

So here’s my Cheap Bastid version of these.  I make my pie crust from scratch so start to finish these are going to take maybe an hour to make.  And yes, you could use store-bought, ready made pie crust if you want but I like the challenge and reward of making my own crust.

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