Shepherd's Pie

I think British purists might insist that Shepherd's Pie is made from "lamb mince" rather than ground beef, but here in the States everyone I know thinks of ground beef as the main ingredient to Shepherd's Pie. Lamb is not overly popular here I guess. I never ate it growing up. Maybe it's different in different parts of the country. I can only speak for my West Coast upbringing. I do see lamb in the grocery store, but only know one family that cooks it regularly.

For me, Shepherd's Pie means ground beef cooked with some onion, garlic, and spices, maybe with some added peas and carrots, topped with mashed potatoes. When I was perusing recipes tonight I saw various additions to the ground beef, including:

tomato sauce versus ketchup
different herbs (cumin was the one that stood out, as opposed to the more typical parsley, etc.)
onions and/or garlic cooked with the ground beef
Worcestershire sauce was a common addition, but not ubiquitous
liquid: varied from beef broth to white wine to red wine

Basically, brown the beef (and onions and garlic), add the herbs and liquid and simmer a few minutes. One recipe had oats added to stretch the beef. Another used a mixture of mashed turnips and potatoes.

Then there was the "thickener." Some recipes had added cornstarch; some had sour cream stirred into the cooked ground beef.

I love seeing the patterns of recipes like this. It makes it so much easier for me to wing it and fix dinner based on what I have around, rather than strictly following some recipe. Mine came out delicious and was, as best as I can remember, based on:

1 pound ground beef
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup oats if you want to stretch the meal
1 cup or more mixed frozen vegetables
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup red wine (because it was open)
1 tsp cumin
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup ketchup
1/2 cup sour cream
a few cups mashed potatoes
1/2 cup grated Cheddar cheese

Brown the ground beef with the onions and garlic. Drain any accumulated fat. Rinse with hot water for extra fat-leaching or blot with a paper towel. Stir in the vegetables and seasonings (up to the sour cream) and cook a few more minutes to blend. Turn the heat off and stir in the sour cream.

I had made extra mashed potatoes last night with the plan of using them tonight so I heated them in the microwave to make it easier to spread them.

Put the meat and vegetable mixture into a 9x9 pan. Spread the mashed potatoes over the top, then sprinkle the grated cheese on top of the potatoes. We thought it looked a bit bare at that point so sprinkled some paprika across the cheese.

Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes until heated through. Likewise, if your skillet is oven-proof you could just put the potatoes on top of the meat, top with the potatoes and cheese, and then put the whole skillet in the oven rather than dirtying another dish.

Half of this served 3 of us.

Steaks with Bearrnaise Sauce

Date night last night. My normal mode of shopping is to plan for the entire week so the idea of shopping for one meal that you're going to cook in a few hours is a novelty. But I had company. The girls were gone so we could have fun cooking grownup food and sharing the kitchen.

We wandered the grocery store as we planned dinner, then went through and got what we needed: good steaks, shallots, mushrooms, a packet of frozen potatoes he likes, and some brandy and sangria for cocktails.

Cheap sangria by itself is a bit, uh, cloying. I like good sangria so had my doubts about this drink he had in mind. But add a splash of good brandy to the cheap sangria and it's quite good! Refreshing and a nice change from my usual pre-dinner Chardonnay.

The steaks were seasoned with some seasoned salt and pepper, then cooked stovetop. I almost always grill stuff but these came out so tender and good I might rethink things. Of course, we started out with better meat than my normal.

The packet of frozen potatoes were easy and good. I could have easily made my own oven roasted potatoes but for a quick meal these are very good and easy. We added some asparagus tips to the pan and it made a wonderful combination.

The bearrnaise sauce. I haven't made it in ages. It is so rich--but so good! He added some sliced mushrooms to the vinegar and shallots cooking, which made a good addition. Unfortunately, the sauce curdled at the end. We looked up two methods of "fixing" it but neither one worked. It still tasted good, but looked like...well, never mind what it looked like. So can someone tell me why it curdled? Did we cook it too long? Was it that the butter was cold when we added it? Those are the two things we came up with as possibilities. The steaks took just a few minutes longer than we'd thought so the sauce was on the heat a few minutes longer than we'd planned.

Anyway, a delicious dinner none-the-less and so much fun to cook with someone else!

Pureed Parsnips

In my continuing quest to experiment with more seasonal vegetables, I picked up some parsnips and turnips at the market this weekend. I have used both in winter vegetable soups. I typically use turnips in my Cornish pasties and have roasted both with various other vegetables fairly often but had not cooked them on their own. The raw parsnips smelled quite a bit like raw carrots to me, and looked like them too, albeit white. I stumped the clerk at the grocery store, who had to first ask me what they were and then look them up on the chart. I've always been in awe of the clerks being able to remember the codes for all the different produce and I guess if you don't cook learning to recognize them is tricky in itself!

I was going to do a pureed thing and saw that you could easily combine the parsnips with turnips or carrots but decided to keep them "pure" the first time so I could know the taste. I liked them. The kids were so-so but I know that if I keep serving them they'll get used to them and just eat them because they're there. As is typical, when I try a brand new food like this I make sure to have other stuff on the table, so I cooked up some spinach and made some pasta and ricotta to go with the pork tenderloin that was the main course.

1 pound small parsnips, peeled and cut into chunks
1 Tbs butter
2 Tbs milk or the water they were cooked in, roughly
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbs dried parsley flakes

Steam or microwave the parsnips until you can pierce them easily with a fork.

Put them in a food processor with the butter and puree them. Add just enough liquid (milk or the water the parsnips were cooked in) to make the consistency you like. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the parsley. You can make these ahead and then reheat in the microwave or in a small saucepan over very low heat.

They have a distinct, but very pleasant, flavor. A friend who came to dinner was reminded of coconut and he was off thinking about some curry. Then he mixed them with the pasta and ricotta and thought that was heavenly. Me, I liked them as they were. The flavor is mild but unique. I think the kids would probably more readily eat them if I included some cooked carrots in the puree next time. The color made them think of mashed potatoes and then they had that disappointment factor fighting against the parsnips, although they didn't reject them totally.

So the dinner was, for those of you who like menu ideas:

barbecued marinated pork tenderloin
steamed spinach
pasta and ricotta
pureed parsnips
applesauce

Favorite Dinner: Soup and Sandwiches

Our first high school swim meet last night, so we were home about 6:30 with one starving wet child and one starving dry child. And me. They wanted to order a pizza but not only would that have taken longer than cooking dinner, we'd already had pizza once this week. I was about to dice up some cooked potatoes to fry with scrambled eggs when the eldest asked for soup and grilled cheese. She's been asking me to make a batch of grilled cheese sandwiches to take for lunch so I settled on that. (She likes to freeze the cooked sandwiches and then grab one in the morning for lunch. They thaw by lunch and she loves them although that sounds gross to me.)

The soup was actually easier than the sandwiches. I pulled two quarts of chicken broth from the freezer and put them in a pan over medium heat to melt. Meanwhile I peeled and sliced a few carrots, throwing them in the chicken broth as soon as it was simmering, added almost a cup of those tiny little ball pastas we love, ancini de pepe or something like that. We call them frog's eyes, hence the soup is typically called Frog Eye Soup around here! I would have put more carrots in but I ran out of carrots. I simmered the soup until the carrots were tender and the pasta was cooked, about 10 minutes. I made the sandwiches while the soup cooked. Then I added a tsp of dried parsley and a bit less than a teaspoon of marjoram. At the table I put out a small bowl of grated Parmesan to sprinkle over the soup.

The girls ate the rest of the soup for an early lunch/late breakfast today so it's gone already. Luckily, I bought 3 whole chickens the other day and cut up and froze two of them, saving the backs and necks in the freezer for broth so I'm ready to make another big batch of chicken broth. And I bought 5 pounds of carrots today so I won't run low soon!

Recipe Help Please: Pork Roast

Being as this blog is a part of the CheapCooking.com site, my frugal mind influences a lot of what I buy to cook. Sometimes at the grocery store, I see something where the price is so good that I have to experiment a bit. So it was yesterday when I "swung by" for some tortillas and a few other minor things and saw a pork shoulder blade roast for 99 cents a pound. I know in other parts of the country that might not raise any interest, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area, or at least in the suburbs where I live, finding anything but chicken for less than $1 per pound makes me pause. Hmmm.... how many servings can I get out of that? So the pork roast caught my eye. It doesn't look extremely fatty and it's boneless, so that seems like a lot of meat. In fact, my online cost per serving calculator I had a friend build for me says it's about 3 servings per pound, so 33 cents per serving.

But I'm feeling adventurous and want to try something new. I looked through a few cookbooks and have a few backup plans but thought I'd try something new and solicit ideas from the blogosphere. I'm thinking 40 cloves of garlic, or something Cuban, or pulled pork (which I've got a fantastic recipe for already so is less intriguing). There's only 3 of us to feed here so I'm looking for something that makes fantastic leftovers. I'll probably end up freezing part of it because I hate to eat the same thing all week.

So PLEASE send me your favorite pork roast recipes! Just add a comment below and link to your recipe or enter it right in the comment!

Stir Fried Asparagus with Sesame Seeds

We all love asparagus. And while I normally don't buy things I can grow, my asparagus patch is not large enough yet to support our desire. I actually planted it in what turned out to be a bad spot (because it shades another part of the vegetable garden at its peak) so I'm trying to split it, which will delay the year it can satisfy our need.

So I bought our first big bunch of asparagus the other day, at Costco actually. Remembering my friend's advice from last year, I cut the ends off and stood the whole bunch in a container of water. I've been pulling out what we can eat each night. I've steamed them and roasted them and wanted to try something different last night. I saw a recipe for stir fried asparagus with roasted sesame seeds and decided to try it. Fantastic! Just what I was looking for--something to taste the asparagus but still have some more flavors going on. The original recipe called for a sliced scallion/green onion but I didn't have any and just left it out.

1 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp oil (I use olive)
1 pound or so asparagus
1 Tbs soy sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp sugar

Trim the asparagus. Cut off the tough ends and/or peel them a bit. I'm personally too lazy to peel them, so I just trim them down. Cut them into 1 inch pieces. If you want to be fancy, cut them on the diagonal which somehow looks better. It doesn't take much more work.

Heat your frying pan up and put the sesame seeds in it. Stir them constantly until they are toasted. Remove them from the pan and set them aside.

Heat the oil in the pan. Add the asparagus and cook, stirring constantly, about 3 minutes. If you happen to have a green onion, add it at the same time. If not, skip it or add some dried onion flakes if you'd like.

Add the soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar and stir. Cover and cook another 2-3 minutes, until the asparagus is tender. Sprinkle with the sesame seeds before serving.