Production for Pasties

I spent today putting preparing two ingredients for pasties. (In case you're wondering, it's pronounced pass-tees).

A pasty, if you don't know, is a meat and potato and onion mixture in dough. Think meat and potatoes calzone .... sort of. This area was a mining area way back when. We aren't called the Ruby Valley because it sounds cute, and Butte wasn't known as "The Richest Hill on Earth" for nothing. Anyway, the miners would take pasties with them to work and that's what they ate for lunch or, you know, if the mine caved in.

Every year the junior class has a pasty sale. The money they make goes towards their Close-Up program (a week in D.C.). It's a BIG deal here. And when all is said and done, I will be the only father of an only child who will have worked on Close-Up fundraisers for six consecutive years (now that we do the foreign exchange student thing).

So today we prepped. Took 300 lbs of onions and gobs and gobs of potatoes to the processing plant where we sliced and diced and bagged and boxed from 11 until 3. We made good time. The onions almost killed me. They actually fed us at lunch time.

But here's the best news of all: after spending all day running onions and potatoes down the shredder and dicer, I still have all my fingers.

I like my fingers. This was a good thing.