Flexibility and Comfort Food

So I was feeling adventurous at the commissary the other day, and I bought some turnips...And they've been sitting in my fridge since then, because I had absolutely no idea what to do with them.  My standard tactic in this situation is to google, "turnip recipes" and see what pops up, but the first recipe that I found was this.  Now, AllRecipes is a great site, but they are not a vegan site, so I shouldn't have been surprised that this recipe contained both beef and lard (though really, who uses lard anymore?)  Still, the idea looked interesting, so I decided to make some modifications.

Crust:
Mix 4 cups flour, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1 1/2 cups lard-substitute in medium sized bowl.  Further google-ized research revealed that various items may be substituted for lard, but I chose 1 cup Crisco vegetable shortening + 1/2 cup organic applesauce.  The recipe says to mix these ingredients directly with your hands, but since I was using a slightly different mixture, I recommend mixing the shortening and applesauce before adding them to the flour/salt mixture.  Finally, add 10 tablespoons of ice water, form into 6 equally sized balls, and refrigerator for approximately 1 hour.

Filling:
Here is where I largely deviated from the recipe.  Since this is basically a dinner pastry, I figured any combination of vegetables would suffice.  Tonight, I used the following, but we're really only limited by creativity:
- Broccoli flowerets (is that not a word?)
- Yellow onion, diced
- 2 Turnips, peeled and cut into chunks (the whole reason for the recipe, after all)
- A handful of baby red potatoes, also cut into chunks
- Firm tofu, sliced and cubed
- MorningStar Farms tvp chik'n

I also took the advice of one of the recipe reviewers and decided to add gravy, which gave the filling more of a pot-pie feel.  AllRecipes had a great vegan gravy recipe, which I followed to the letter, and it was good.

So after all my substitutions, the problem came when I tried to make the actual pastries.  According to the original recipe, you're supposed to roll the dough into roughly 9" circles.  Following which, you scoop a decent amount of filling into the middle, pull one end over to the other, and pinch the edges together.  I don't know if it was the fact that I couldn't get the dough decently flat (did I mention I don't own a rolling pin?) or that the substitutions changed the consistency of the dough, but I couldn't get it to come up in one piece.  So I improvised, created foil "bowls," and formed the dough into lid-less pot-pies inside of them.

I still cooked them at 200 degrees (Celsius; Fahrenheit would be 400 degrees) for 45 minutes, and the end result, while not pretty, was flaky and yum.

P.S. Turns out turnips are pretty good.  Read more about them here.