The first key to making this recipe quick is the pre-made mashed potatoes. I know it doesn't take a ton of time to make your own - so go for it, if you want. For this recipe, I bought a bag of frozen mashed potato disks from Trader Joes. They're super easy, and you can make up as much or as little as you want because they're in those mini cylinder shapes. For this recipe, I just used the whole bag. In the past, if I didn't have this brand of mashed potatoes, I have bought the tubs of mashed potatoes from the refrigerator section. If your supermarket deli sells mashed potatoes, you could also use that.
The second key to making this recipe quick is the frozen vegetables. You really could use whatever mix you wanted. This time I used a bag of "Organic Foursome" from Trader Joes. It's corn, green beans, peas, and carrots - pretty fitting combination of vegetables for shepherd's pie. I've used combinations before that have green and red peppers and broccoli that worked out really well also. Whatever you want will probably work. Except if it has baby corn in it - that stuff is kinda gross.
Table
Here's the basic recipe:
1 pound ground beef
1 cup ketchup
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 pound frozen vegetables
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 3/4 pound mashed potatoes
Heat oven to 400 deg F. Brown the ground beef. Spoon off the excess fat. Add the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. Add the frozen vegetables to the ground beef mixture and heat up a few minutes, mixing frequently.
Place this meat & vegetable mixture into an oven safe casserole dish.
For the mashed potatoes, Morty helped me grate the cheese (hand over hand, of course). He likes to help fix food - even if he doesn't like to eat it...
Mix the grated cheese into the prepared mashed potatoes (if using frozen, prepare according to package directions). Spread the mashed potatoes on top of the meat & vegetables and bake in the oven for about 10 minutes.
And that's it! So easy and so good when it's cold outside.
Tube
The g-tube blenderized version of this recipe is pretty easy too. You just use about 1/4 of the shepherd's pie. Here it is:
| Whole Milk | 1 cup |
| orange juice | 1/2 cup |
| Shepherd's Pie | 1/4 meal |
| applesauce | 1 cup |
| olive oil | 3 T |
| Children's Multivitamin | 1/2 tablet |
| calcium chews supplement | 1/2 chew |
| Volume (oz) | 36 |
| Cal/oz | 36.3 |
| Cal/cc | 1.2 |
| % Fat | 20% |
| % Carbohydrates | 63% |
| % Protein | 17% |
I recently got the Blendtec "Wildside" jar because after a little over a year of constant use, the seal on my original jar started to fail. I chose the Wildside so that I could double my recipes and make a mix up every other day, instead of every day. That's worked pretty well so far. But when I made this recipe up, I doubled it. And I also think that I used a little more than double of the 1/4 shepherd's pie. I had originally planned to also add some kefir, but I totally ran out of room in the blender.
This recipe came out pretty thick - I'm sure because of the mashed potatoes and the omission of kefir. What I ended up doing was warming the mix up each time before I squirted Morty's bolus in. That helps make it easier to push. I normally don't do that because I don't want to kill the good probiotic kefir cultures, but since I didn't use kefir this time, there's no reason not to.
The other tricky thing about this blend is that it kinda leaves a red greasy film in the syringe and tube. Probably from the ground beef and ketchup combination. You know what I'm talking about - the same thing that discolors tupperware. Our extension tubes often get discolored from food, which isn't too big of a deal since we switch them out every few weeks anyway. I did make sure that I used some dish soap when I rinsed the tube and syringe out for this blend - just to try and take the greasy film out. That seemed to help.
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