Make A Beef Pot Pie With Leftover Steak For An Easy Weeknight Meal

Planning a week's worth of meals can be difficult, even for the most seasoned of home cooks. You have to take budget and family preferences into consideration, not to mention making sure you buy enough so that you'll have plenty of leftovers, which are always a saving grace. And if you happen to find yourself with some leftover steak, an assortment of vegetables, and some prepackaged pie crust, you should definitely consider making a beef pot pie. 

Beef pot pie is one of those recipes that can either be quick and easy, or long and complicated. If you're making it from scratch, a long braise does wonders for the meat and leaves you with a great base for the gravy. However, if you're pressed for time on a weeknight, this savory pie is a one pan meal you can assemble and cook in just over an hour. You could even assemble it in the morning before work, keep it in the fridge, then pop it in the oven as soon as you get home. There is no shortage of ways you can make this meal fit your weekly schedule. 

Though leftover steak could be used to make sandwiches, or even reheat on its own, adding it to vegetables and some gravy stretches the meat much farther. However, any kind of cooked beef will work for a pot pie, so whatever you have in the fridge is going to be perfectly acceptable for this easy weeknight meal. 

If we had to pick a cut of beef that is the best choice for beef pot pie, we'd have to say a chuck roast because of its excellent marbling fat and melt-in-your-mouth texture. However, don't be limited to that. Whatever you have in the refrigerator should work. This is a leftovers recipe after all. 

One other thing that will shave off time is to use pre-packaged pie dough. These come in large, rectangular sheets. Depending on how you like your beef pot pie, you could use one or two sheets, either encasing the whole pie, or just layering a crust over the top. If you really want to make your own pie crust, you will have to account for the resting period it requires in the fridge, plus the blind bake if you plan on having a bottom crust. 

There is also no shortage of vegetables to add to a beef pot pie. Onion, celery, carrots, peas, mushrooms, parsnips, and potatoes. For the gravy, all you'll need is a beef stock thickened with a little roux and flavored with herbs and aromatics like rosemary and garlic. Assembling the pie is a easy as filling a baking dish, layering on the dough, doing an egg or milk wash, and poking holes in the top so steam can escape. Bake at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 to 25 minutes until the crust is brown and crispy.