This one’s for Wilkins; it’s a Pi Day / St. Patrick’s Day twofer.

Ingredients

• 1 lb. stew lamb
• 1 onion
• A few tbsp diced tomatoes (whatever was left in the can you used for pasta the other night)
• 1 clove garlic
• 6-8 ice cubes of broth – I make broth from whatever bones and scraps I have left over after other cooking, and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy use later. Fortuitously, my most recent batch was mostly lamb ribs and onion butts.
• ~1/2 pint Guinness
• Salt, pepper, and MSG to taste

• 1 cup white flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 8 tbps (1 stick) butter
• 2 1/2 tbsp vegetable shortening, and when I realized that we were out of shortening, I added some lard, too.
• Small amount of ice water

Heat a skillet with a small amount of oil over medium-high heat. Brown the lamb meat for a few minutes – not to cook it through, just to get those delicious Maillard reactions happening on the surface. Put it in a crock pot with the rest of the stew ingredients on low overnight.

Cut the fat into the flour. Add the ice water a little bit at a time, mixing it in with a folding motion, until the fatty flour turns into dough. Form it into a couple of patties and chill overnight. Or, just use a premade savory pie crust, or some canned biscuit dough or something.

When you get up in the morning to make your other pies, stir in 1/3 to 1/2 cup flour as a thickening agent and turn the crock pot to high.

Roll out the crust and assemble the pie.

Bake in a 425 ºF oven for 20-30 minutes, until the crust is poofy golden brown.