shepherd's pie

I posted the recipe for this pie some years ago in my old food blog, but I made it again last night and thought I’d post it up here.


Shepherd's Pie



This is a great pie for hiding things in. It’s so chunky, an extra ingredient is easy to slip in. It’s not necessarily going to hide the shape of the mushrooms, since mushrooms are pretty obvious, but it helps to hide the flavour and texture, if your aversion to mushrooms is, like mine was, solely texture based.

When we first went vegetarian, D declared that I had to learn to eat a lot of the dreaded mushrooms, and having recipes that made it easy to disguise the flavour really helped. And now I really like mushrooms!


ingredients

1 can kidney beans (drained)
handful of mushrooms
one tomato
half cup stock or wine
one carrot
half cup of peas
half capsicum
half an onion
chives
parsley
chilli flakes
pepper
one garlic clove
tomato sauce
four potatoes


method

Dice the carrot, onion, tomato and capsicum. Fry the onion in some olive oil with the chilli flakes, pepper, parsley, chives and a squirt of tomato sauce until the onion is translucent. Mince the garlic and fry, then add the carrot, capsicum and tomato, as well as the stock or wine. You may not need the whole half cup, though. After the tomato renders down a bit, add the mushrooms (diced or cut small) and the kidney beans. Allow the liquid to evaporate a little, then add the peas and heat through. Spoon filling into an oven dish.

In the meantime, prepare the potatoes for mashing. I like to boil them with some garlic, and mash with a little nuttelex. Spread the mashed potatoes over the top of the filling, then brush or drizzle a little olive oil.

Bake for ten minutes at 190C.