Nissa and Gordon's Cottage Pie for Brad

Boston is famous for it's high concentration of Irish Luck, especially on St. Patrick's Day. This is my first St. Patrick's Day celebration in Boston so I'm looking forward to the parade on Sunday, and I enjoyed the exodus from the bars in my neighborhood late last night. It was highly entertaining. My fiancé's family has some Irish heritage to speak of. He has a blond patch in the middle of his dark brown hair. His family jokes that it should have been red, like his grandmother's, but it wasn't mixed properly! So last night, in his honor, I edited Gordon Ramsay's Shepherd Pie recipe into a cottage pie (it's only shepherd pie if you use lamb)with a nod to the Irish, rather than the English, lineage of the dish by changing some of the ingredients. Here is the original recipe, with a video to clarify some of the directions regarding the method, and below is the recipe with my modifications.

Mash

1.5 lbs Yukon gold potatoes

1/4 cup cream

1/2 cup grated Dubliner Cheese, plus extra for sprinkling on top

2 egg yolks

salt and pepper to taste (I omitted them completely though)

Mince

1.5 lbs ground beef

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 onion, finely grated

1 carrot, finely grated

1/4 cup stout

1 small can tomato paste

at least 2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce (I'm not sure how much I added, but I was liberal with it)

3 sprigs fresh thyme, removed from stem

1 sprig fresh rosemary, removed from stem and finely chopped

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.

Peel and cut the potatoes into roughly 2 inch cubes/chunks and put them on to boil in salted water for about 15 minutes while you prepare the mince.

In a large (maybe 10 inch) pan, brown the beef over medium heat, stirring constantly so it's nice and crumbly. Drain the fat and return the beef to the heat. Add the garlic, onions and carrots. Add the stout, tomato paste, and Worcestershire Sauce. Finally add the fresh herbs. Taste it and adjust the seasonings accordingly. Turn off the heat and set it aside.

Drain the potatoes and return them to their pot. Ramsay put the potatoes through a ricer, but I just agressively stirred them with a wooden spoon. An electric hand mixer would probably do a nice job for these if you didn't use a non-stick pot. Add cream, yolks and cheese. Whip until thick.

Put the mince in a 9 inch cake pan...or some such vessel. Spread the mash over the meat, sealing the edges the best you can (if you don't the juices from the meat bubble over the edge when you put it in the oven and makes a mess. I learned that the hard way.) If you can't just make sure there's a layer of foil or something underneath the pan to catch the drippings. Sprinkle some extra cheese on top and fork through the potato gently so the peaks can brown.

Bake for 18-20 minutes.

This is a good meal to hide veggies from finicky eaters (if you're in to that sort of thing). Do grate the carrots and onions, even if you like chunky veggies, because it makes a really flavorful sauce. Add more vegetables if you want, but do that in addition to what is already in the recipe. I'll definitely make this again with some sliced carrots, sliced mushrooms, chopped onion, and peas. Also, you might notice that I omitted the olive oil from my recipe. That's because the beef was quite fatty enough on it's own, and I didn't want greasy cottage pie. I also omitted the chicken broth. That's because the author of the other blog did so, and found that it turned out fine. One less ingredient! Haha! One final tip, please be sure to do all your chopping, peeling, and grating before hand, as the cooking process moves quite quickly once it's underway.