Kreatopitakia

“Kreatopita” is meat-pie in greek, and it is very very well loved in Northern Greece (where I’m from). In fact, in my area, Pieria, we even cut it instead of Vasilopita on New Year’s Day. Of course, us being food lovers, we eat both!
But I digressed. Kreatopitaki (Kreatopitakia being the word’s plural, yes, greek is complicated!) is a small meat-pie, say, one portion.
That’s what I made, after all of these months of hiatus. Believe me, it is a good comeback! The story behind these is that I was looking for a few good beer snacks, because we were having people over. It wouldn’t be anything formal, it would be just us, sitting in the balcony, enjoying the beautiful summer night and having a beer. Me being me, I thought “we should be snacking on something”.
I ended up with this:

That’s nachos and spinach muffins, bruschette caprese, with eggplant and garlic, and mushroom and bacon, kreatopitakia, chilli, sausages, and then sweet muffins and chocolate pie for desert. We ended up just eating, I’m not sure anyone even had any beer, we all just had coke or wine. I know how to ruin plans, you know?

Anyway, that being said, I got calls the next day, and messages on FB about my kreatopitakia, by our friends that were there and also by their girlfriends or in one case the girlfriend of a friend who wasn’t there but heard it from another friend, you get the picture. So, I thought, yup, this is worth a post.

Or a video.

I’m playing around with Final Cut again, and thought I’d give video-cooking a shot. I know that’s not even a term, but so what? I grabbed my iPad (and my phone in some cases, when the iPad had run out of battery, for some reason it is always close to death, did someone say Words With Friends?) and recorded most of the process. So, there it is, right underneath the recipe.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I enjoyed making them. I actually know you will!

What you need

2 sheets of short crust pastry
2 tablespoons olive oil
400g minced meat, beef
1 onion, sliced
200g mushrooms, chopped
2 tablespoons flour
200 ml red wine
1 tablespoon tomato paste
250 ml beef stock
Rosemary
salt and pepper
1 sheet puff pastry
1 egg, lightly beaten

What you need to do

Preheat oven to 200°C / 400°F. Lightly grease a 12 hole muffin tin. Cut out 12 x 12 cm rounds of pastry. They don’t have to be precisely 12 cm, just around 12 cm, in order to form a good basket with the help of the muffin tin. Press them into the base of each muffin tin. Place in the freezer for 10 minutes to chill. Bake for about 15 minutes until ready (they should be near “golden”, which in real life terms means “you know, ready, like you see in cookbooks”).

Leave them aside, to cool down, and in the meantime prepare your meat.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a medium saucepan over a high heat. Brown the meat and then remove from saucepan. Add the remaining oil in your pan, reduce the temperature, add your veggies (you could probably add some red chilli pepper here, for a kick) and cook for about a minute. Return meat to the pan and stir through the flour. Cook for one minute then add the wine, tomato paste, stock and rosemary.

Cook for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until ready. While it’s cooking, check it regularly, give it a stir, see how it’s doing, don’t just let it do this on its own! When it’s done, season with salt and pepper to your liking and set aside to cool.

At this point, fight your urge to eat the meat. It’ll be a struggle, but you can do it, I believe in you.

While the meat is cooling down and to give you something to do in order to help you not eat it, spread the puff pastry on your workstation (I’m doing that on my kitchen counter) and cut out 12 x 10 cm rounds of puff pastry. Again, they don’t have to be exactly 10cm, but keep it close. Remember to preheat your oven again, if you turned it off (I suggest you do, do not waste energy!). 200°C will be fine.

Now, spoon the meat in the pastry baskets and place the puff pastry rounds on top. Press the edges so that they’ll stick, brush them with the egg, pierce the tops and bake them for about 12-15 minutes or 20 or until they are nice, golden and look done. Mine took around 20 minutes.

My advice is to eat them and not store them, as they don’t drive me crazy when cooled in the fridge. But if you want to store them, do so in the fridge!

Enjoy!