mock shepherd's pie

If often amazes me how much favour is shown to us by others. There are a few eating establishments that my family and I like to patronise. I have noticed that the more often we eat there, the larger our meal portions get.

When Da bought a packet of vegetarian noodles from a coffee shop for me, the stallholder gave us so much ingredients that one look at the portion and I knew that I would not be able to finish eating the noodles if I ate all the ingredients. So as not to waste the food, I scooped out some of the ingredients and put them in a separate bowl.

I used the leftover ingredients to make mock shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie is a meat pie with a crust made from mashed potato. Traditionally, this dish was a means of using leftover roasted meat and the pie dish was lined with mashed potato as well as having a mashed potato crust on top (source: Wikipedia).

Ingredients

*leftover ingredients

3 large potatoes

2 tbsp butter

1/2 tbsp bacon bits

milk

salt (to taste)

pepper (to taste)

(* For the mock shepherd's pie that I made, I used a bowl of leftover ingredients from my vegetarian noodles (without the noodles) and a can of braised peanuts.)

Method

1. Cut the leftover ingredients into bite-sized pieces. There should be a little liquid in your ingredients. As such, if you using dry ingredients, you may want to add a little stock. As I added a can of braised peanuts (which already had a bit of liquid in the can), I did not add any more liquid.

2. Arrange the cut ingredients in a casserole dish.

3. Peel the potatoes and boil them until they are soft. Drain off the potatoes and mash them, adding 2 tbsp of butter and some salt and pepper to taste. Add the bacon bits and mix well. Add some milk to give the mashed potato a creamy consistency.

4. Add the mashed potatoes on top of the cut ingredients, spreading out the mashed potatoes until all the ingredients are covered.

5. Bake in an oven preheated to 190 degrees celsius for 30 minutes.