A twist on a classic that kids and adults are going to love.
Upside-Down Shepherd’s Pie
Ingredients
Basic Ingredients:
- Ground beef or lamb
- Potatoes
- Frozen peas and corn or diced carrots
- Salt & pepper
- Beef Bisto
- Flour
- Butter
- Sour cream
- Milk
- Red wine
Optional Ingredients:
- Garlic
- Onion
- Mushrooms
- Celery
Instructions
- Peel and slice roughly 1 1/2 medium sized russet potatoes per plate. Prepare a saucepan big enough to hold them all with some salted water. Turn on to medium heat.
- Brown your ground meat in a large frying pan with salt and pepper. Once it's browned, remove any grease and add the optional garlic and onions if you're using them. While it's cooking, prepare one heaping tablespoon of Bisto and one more of flour in about 2 cups of cold water. Whisk it well.
- When your potatoes come to a soft boil, add the Bisto mixture, optional sliced mushrooms and celery, 1/2 cup each of frozen peas and corn, or diced carrot, and 1/4 cup of red wine to the beef. Stir well. Keep stirring as the sauce thickens and take it off the heat once it reaches a nice medium-thick consistency.
- When your potatoes are cooked but still firm, drain the potato water and immediately add a tablespoon of butter. Cover it with a lid.
- I'm going to go into detail here in an upcoming column about how to make the best mashed potatoes in the known universe but, for now, I'll keep it simple.
- Mash your potatoes and add a good dollop of sour cream. Mix that in and then add enough milk to make a nice fluffy mixture that spoons easily but is still firm enough to stand upright.
- Plate your potatoes first. Make a ring with them. Add the sauce mixture to the centre of the ring. Garnish with paprika or parsley (or don't, if that will freak the kids out). Some shredded cheese on top rounds things out nicely.
- Show the kids the magic that you have created and explain the game of keeping the moat from escaping. Eat a bit of mountain, fill it in, don't let the moat escape! The circle gets smaller with every bite. But make sure to eat some of the moat as well so it doesn't overflow the mountains.
- The Prince and Princess are watching from the castle tower!
This is 100 percent my own recipe.
For some reason, my kids wouldn’t eat traditional shepherd’s pie. Being a young Dad at the time, I tried everything I could: “Hey! It’s Pie!” “There’s no crust, Dad! No sweet, yummy filling, it’s not pie! It’s gross!”
One of the biggest beefs I’ve always had with traditional shepherd’s pie is how many potatoes it takes to cover the base. It’s like you’ve got to cover it with an inch of potatoes for it to be right, which is about the same as three meals worth of potatoes for the whole family!
So I set out to come up with a solution to both problems and this is what resulted–
- The same ingredients
- Way less time to prepare
- Tastes great
- The kids loved it!
I figured I’d make a game out of it for them. Sometimes parenting and cooking can be a creative experience where we don’t exactly lie to our kids, but we do make things fun. (Remember when you used to make airplane noises with the flying spoon to get them to eat their Pablum?) Yeah! That’s it. Make it fun!
So I devised this concept of a castle. An enclosed moat of meat surrounded by towering mountains of mashed potatoes where they could open up a little bit of the mountain and then try to close it again before the ‘moat’ all leaked out.
The more they ate, the smaller the mountain enclosure got and the happier I was to see them eating a healthy and nutritious meal. Squeals of delight, laughter and all, as they tried to keep the ‘moat’ from escaping!
How much fun is that??
Since the kids have grown I’ve been able to re-introduce garlic, onions, mushrooms and occasionally some celery – all things that would have been a really dumb idea back then. But we still enjoy it on occasion and, as a Grandpa, I’m sure my kids are going to introduce it to their own kids once they are old enough to grasp the magic of the concept.
Ladies, gentlemen and kids of all ages, I present to you, Upside-down Shepherd’s Pie!
