Tamale Pie

For the last pie of the year I decided to do something very different, a Tamale pie (think taco filling with corn muffin on top). I stumbled on a recipe over here and thought it looked yummy. Corn muffin mixes are rare in Australia, so I had to follow another recipe to make those. It was tough enough just finding the cornmeal (hint: look for polenta and read the ingredients carefully to make sure it's actually corn meal)!

Ingredients
Filling

• 500g minced beef
• 1 brown onion
• 1 small can corn kernels
• 1 can kidney beans
• 1 can crushed tomato
• 1 grated carrot
• 3 small brown onions*
• 1 packet of Taco seasoning

Muffin Topping

• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup plain flour
• ⅓ cup white sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, beaten
• ¼ cup oil (original recipe says canola but I used olive)
• 1 cup milk

Method

• Preheat the oven to 200ºC.
• Make the filling by frying the onion until soft, adding the mince and frying until brown, adding the seasoning and stirring until mixed and then adding everything else. Leave it simmer while you get on with making the muffin mix.
• Make the muffin mix by stirring together all the dry ingredients in a bowl and the mixing in the wet stuff gently until you've got a lovely yellow consistent gloop.
• Add some leftover cornmeal to the filling if it's a bit wet until it's nice and thick.
• If you've not used an oven-safe frying pan you should now transfer the filling to a pie dish. Top the filling with globs of the muffin mix in a pleasing pattern. It will spread a little.
• Bake for 20 minutes or until the muffin topping is cooked.

I thought this was quite nice but the muffin top was too sweet. It was so sweet my daughter was turned off it. I reckon my American readers would probably find it palatable (based on my experience with corn muffins over there) but I think next time I'll halve the sugar.

* at this point I was just throwing stuff in I had in the fridge to make it a semi-balanced meal :)