Post-Partum Meals: Shepherd’s Pie Recipe

Shepherd’s Pie (Michael Symon – The Chew)       Preheat oven to 350.

1 tablespoon Butter
2 tablespoons Olive Oil
2 Lb Ground Beef

Salt
1 Yellow Onion (minced)
2 cloves Garlic (minced)
2 Carrots (diced)

1 tablespoon Flour
3 sprigs Thyme (leaves only)
1 cup Beef Stock
2 cups Peas

4 cups Mashed Potatoes
4 tablespoons Butter
Parsley to finish

Heat the butter and olive oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, carrots, and garlic, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the ground beef and season with salt, breaking up, until browned, about 10 minutes. Mix in the flour, stock, thyme and peas into the mixture. Pipe mashed potatoes over top. Bake until mashed potatoes are golden brown in parts, about 30 minutes. Mash together with butter. Let cool slightly. Finish with parsley.

Okay so that’s the original recipe…Here’s what we do.

Add the butter and OO to the cast iron skillet. Add in all the veggies. If you look above (and below) you’ll see yellow in there. That’s corn. Instead of using 2 cups of peas and putting them in later, we add a cup EACH of frozen peas and corn when we do the rest of the veggies. Heavy on the garlic! Chop the onion fine or put it in a food processor.

All the veggies cook a little bit longer and get softer, much better for kid-approved taste! Then add the beef and salt, and cook that, adding stock, seasonings and flour once it’s browned. If you don’t have beef stock, use a different stock or water. We don’t ever have thyme so we used dried oregano–around a teaspoon. Toss in some black pepper, too! Edit: We don’t drain the meat because we get ours super lean from a butcher, there’s never any drippings left in the pan!

Obviously, this is the mashed potato part. You add them and dot it with the butter. I have no idea why you’d want to ‘mash’ the butter onto the cooked pan, so we just do the dotting before baking. Most of the time, we use a special mashed potato recipe.

Bake it and let it rest. We don’t use parsley. I mean, you could, but it doesn’t add much to it. If you wanted the pretty, pick a dried green spice and shake some on.