Roast Lamb & Rosemary Pie

A taste of home, this roast lamb and rosemary pie is made from leftover roast lamb and gravy encased in my grandmother’s crispy, flaky perfect pastry. In collaboration with Try Lamb.

A little family history

It’s 1942. The world is at war.

A young handsome Canadian chap with sticky-out ears and a great big cheeky smile has been posted to a military base on the south coast of England.

There he falls in love with a beautiful young English woman who looks just like Queen Elizabeth. She is driving a bakery van. She returns his love and when the war finishes they get married and he takes her back home to Canada.

These were my maternal grandparents. I never knew my grandmother as she sadly passed away long before I was born, but I was named Elizabeth because my grandmother looked so much like the Queen. 

When I was a child my mother used to make meat pies out of leftover roast beef and my grandmother’s pie crust recipe, written in her notebook as ‘Mum’s Pie Crust’. She had inherited my grandmother’s electric meat grinder and my mother would grind up cold, leftover roast beef along with a carrot and onion.

Any leftover gravy (always made with gravy granules!) would get poured into the resulting minced meat and spooned into a deep pie dish lined with pastry. She would decorate the top of the pie with leftover scraps of pastry; there were always leaves.

Sometimes excess pastry would get made into little sausage rolls, and oh my, the combination of this lard-filled pastry crust encasing the minced meat mixture….  pure childhood heaven. 

If we were really lucky we’d get a slice of this pie, cold, in our packed lunches and it made for the best packed lunches ever.

When I immigrated back across the pond in 1999 (21 years ago this week!) I brought with me a handwritten copy of my grandmother’s pie crust recipe.

So this is my version of my maternal family pie recipe – made with locally sourced lamb, flavoured with homemade lamb stock (see recipe notes) and encased in my grandmother’s flaky pastry recipe. It’s a perfect recipe to share with you this International Women’s Week.

Ingredients

• 750 grams shortcrust pastry (shop-bought or homemade – see notes)
• 600 grams leftover roast lamb
• 1 small onion
• 1 carrot
• 1 tbsp rosemary, chopped
• 300 ml leftover gravy
• salt & pepper, to taste
• egg wash or milk, to glaze

Instructions

1. Chop your leftover, cold roast lamb into small 5 mm dice.
2. Add the finely chopped onion, carrot and rosemary. 
3. Stir in the leftover lamb gravy and season to taste.
4. Line a pie plate with shortcrust pastry, and add the filling.
5. Top with more pastry, crimping the edges to seal.
6. Decorate as desired, brush with milk or an egg wash and bake for 30 minutes at 220 C/200 C fan.

Tips for making roast lamb and rosemary pie

• use leftover roast lamb for this recipe, ideally, if it’s been chilling overnight in the fridge
• you can either finely chop the lamb, carrot and onion or run them through a meat grinder
• use any leftover pastry/filling to make sausage rolls 
• use homemade lamb gravy to bind the ingredients together for the best flavour (see recipe, below)

How to make lamb stock for the best homemade lamb gravy

• Preheat oven to 220 C/ 200 C fan and place lamb bones in a large roasting tin along with 1 unpeeled quartered onion, 1 halved carrot, 1 celery stick and a handful of unpeeled garlic cloves
• drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with dried rosemary
• roast in the oven for 45 minutes
• transfer all the contents of the roasting tin to a large stockpot and cover with water
• add a few parsley stems, bay leaves and around 10 peppercorns
• bring to a simmer, and gently simmer for four hours until the liquid is dark and reduced
• strain, reserving the liquid

The Try Lamb, Love Lamb Campaign

Lamb is an incredibly delicious and versatile ingredient. It’s easy to grow, too, thriving in European pastures.

Try Lamb was created to showcase the ease and versatility with which lamb could be incorporated into family meals. I and a team of other foodies and home cooks have been regularly sharing lamb recipes with our followers, in collaboration with Try Lamb, in hopes that we will help inspire you to give lamb a try. Trust me, you’ll love it!

You can find out more about lamb by visiting the Try Lamb website.

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This is a sponsored recipe in collaboration with Try Lamb, although all thoughts and opinions expressed are our own. Thank you for supporting the brands who make it possible for me to do what I love: mess up my kitchen and share recipe stories.