Tonight I (Max) decided to make shepherd’s pie with ground lamb. It seemed a good Irish recipe to make on St. Patrick’s Day. Essentially its ground lamb and vegetables topped with mashed potatoes. What better combination? The recipe is pretty simple but there is a fair amount of peeling and chopping.
First you start the mashed potatoes (peel 1- 1/2 pounds baking potatoes, chop, put in pan with water and bring to a boil.) Note: try to use yukon gold potatoes if you can.
While the potatoes are cooking, preheat oven to 400 degrees and make the meat filling; here are the ingredients:
- 1 cup chopped onion
- 2 carrots peeled & chopped small
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped small
- 1- 1./2 pounds ground lamb*
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 2 teaspoons tomato paste
- 1 cup chicken broth or wine (we used wine)
- 2 teaspoons chopped rosemary
- 2 teaspoons chopped thyme
Sautee the onion and carrots in olive oil until they start to soften, add the garlic and stir well. Then add ground lamb and salt & pepper. Cook till meat is cooked through and browned.
Then add the tomato paste, broth (or wine) and herbs. Bring to boil and let simmer for about 10 minutes.
When potatoes are tender, drain and add 1/4 cup cream and 3 oz. unsalted butter. Salt and pepper to taste (as if you were going to eat them straight).**
Finally, spoon the lamb mix intion a 11 x 7 pan, top with mashed potatoes and bake for 20 -25 minutes until potatoes begin to brown.
If you like you can add 1 cup of peas to the lamb mix before you put it in the dish. We prefer our peas on the side (and some of us prefer no peas at all:).
*In our portions, everyone agreed that more lamb was needed with the large amount of mashed potatoes in the dish. We recomend adding at least another 1/2 pound of ground lamb.
**The potatoes were quite plain. Without Yukon Gold Potatoes, large amounts of salts are neccessary.
For dessert we had an improvised “dobosh torte”. We accidentally bought a plain pound cake (it was labelled pumpkin bread but once we tasted it we realized it was mislabeled). My mom remembered that her mom had told her a trick for making a fast “fancy” torte. You slice a store-bought pound cake horizontally and then you make a quick frosting of melted chocolate chips and butter and spread it between the horizontal layers and on top. We tried it and it tasted really good. It wasn’t the prettiest cake we have ever made but it still tasted good and was definitely better than plain old pound cake.
