Steak and ale pie

Losing weight eating the food we love. Here is what we've been eating! It's been a bit of a meaty weekend, and today - we made our own steak and ale pies. Very rich and filling and brought a smile to the gloomy winter's day.

The shin of beef (1 kg) was placed in a slow cooker and covered with an English ale. We threw in the usual thyme, bay leaf, leek, carrot, onion, celery and a star anise. Use whatever stock vegetables you have.
It was cooked overnight and left to cool while the stock was reduced and thickened slightly with cornflour.
We filled TWO 9"/23cm pie dishes with the meat, some lightly fried onions and covered generously with gravy. The pastry was made using beef suet. 250g of self raising flour to 125g of suet. Around 150ml of water was added to form a dough.
It's economical to make two pies, both on calories and on cost/time. I've worked out that each pie contains around 1600 calories each!! I had a quarter of the pie (see photo) and that was enough for me - as the pure ingredients were just so rich and filling, and I couldn't finish my plate. Each quarter of the pie was packed full with around 100g of beef.
This plateful with the mash, peas and carrots should set you back around 650 calories.
The suet pastry was something new we wanted to try. It was tasty, but softer than your usual short crust. I think I prefer the latter... however, it was still very delicious. The shin of beef could have been turned into a casserole, but we've been wanting to try this pastry for a while, ever since we saw it in a  newspaper. At less than £1.50 per portion, this meal was pretty economical too.
We all have a calorie allowance - and we like to post our main meals to show you what we are eating. You won’t find us posting every last morsel though – but we hope this gives you an idea of how far calories can go!

If you would like to know more about how we have achieved our fabulous weight loss eating all this wonderful food - take a look at OUR UNIQUE METHOD.

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