We cooked up our tourtierre filling last night. It went really well, though next year, I'm going to have to invest in a large stock pot or something similar. The 12 pounds of meat just fit in my roaster, making it pretty difficult to stir, not to mention work with on one element.
I had plenty of help, as well. Eldest had met up with a friend downtown, but it was so cold, they ended up coming here. I was on the way out to do the last big grocery shopping before Christmas, so I picked them up at the train station so they wouldn't have to walk or bus the rest of the way. I intended to just drop them off at home, fill the gas tank, then go shopping when I jokingly asked if they wanted to come along. They decided to come with me! That worked our rather well.
Oh, it was quite nice to fill that tank from about 1/8th to full for only $31. The last time I had to fill that tank when it was that empty, it cost me almost $60.
The girls were a great help at the grocery store, and carried most of the bags in for me, too. Then, when it came time to actually cook the tourtierre filling, and had 3 extra sets of hands to make short work of thing. I got Youngest peeling garlic cloves for me - in the living room, since there was no space in the kitchen. Eldest's friend measured out the salt and spices for me while Eldest prepped the food processor and started peeling onions. Meanwhile, I was unwrapping packages of meat and mixing them up in the roaster. That grossed everyone out. LOL
Youngest chopped up the garlic cloves for me, too. We've got a handy little chopper for that. By the time Eldest finished peeling the onions, she was weeping from the fumes, so we kicked her out of the kitchen to deal with that while her friend quartered them for me and I pulsed the pieces in the processor. I love kitchen appliences! Can you imagine having to finely chop a bag of onions manually?
When the cooking was done and the meat was cooled down a bit, I covered it with a layer of foil, popped the lid on the roaster and we set it out onto the balcony for the night.
Problems started this morning, when my husband couldn't open the inside sliding door. Water had pooled in the tracks and frozen overnight. We ended up having to use a hair drier - and a towel to sop all the water up - to be able to open the door. It took something like half an hour before we could get the meat back inside! Unfortunately, it's going to happen again. Things get pretty humid in here, and the baseboard heaters are under all the windows. There's going to be constant melt and freeze all winter. Last year, we only had to thaw things about a couple of times. We'll see how it turns out this year.
The frosty meat is a bit of a chuckle. It isn't actually frozen solid, though the outer edges are pretty close. We'll start making the pastry in the afternoon. It should be workable by then.
We're really looking forward to trying our first tourtierre tonight. We've never had boar meat before. I wonder how much it'll change the flavour?
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