ottawa foodies

The vendor at the Carp Farmers' Market is the English Pie Shop. Thanks for that!

There's a vendor at the Carp Farmer's Market selling meat pies. Can't remember the name. I think the Scottish and Irish Store in Bells Corners might also carry them.

If you want the local version, Les Fougeres sells frozen tortieres that are great.

Believe it or not, one of the best places for take-home meat pie is Costco. Their meat pie won a Montreal "best meat pie" contest. It's large, very good, lots of filling, pastry's OK and very nicely spiced. Not cheap--I think it's around $15, but worth it if you aren't making it yourself.

Here is the steak pie. Tasty, in that British sort of way. ;-)

I recently bought a smoked turkey and bacon pot pie and a pork and mushroom meat pie from these guys at the Landsdowne farmer's market. Wow! Delicious. The pie crust for both of these were flaky, crispy, and tasty, everything you look for in pie pastry. I'll talk first about the smoked turkey and bacon pot pie. The filling was the usual suspects, veggies, smoked turkey and bacon, smothered in stock and cooked together until all the flavours infused with one another. When I cut the pie open (sharing with my wife) the filling just oozed out. Thinking that the turkey pot pie was delicious, we moved on to the pork and mushroom pie... and we were blown away. The filling is shredded heritage pork with combination of 8 different mushroom varieties (so I'm told). I was able to pick out shitake, portabella, enoki, oyster and honshimeji. I'm not sure if the other 3 were in my specific one (everything is homemade and thus open to change). Because of the many asian variety of mushrooms, there was a distinct asian flavour or flair to the pie. It was absolutely delicious. So delicious in fact that I went again this week to pick up 2 more of them. Highly recommended!