Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. Iím Heather and tonight
we are making Shepherdís Pie.
Now, obviously traditional shepherdís pie is with lamb and a lot of people when they
make a vegetarian r a vegan shepherdís pie theyíre gonna call it something like friendly
pie or something like that.
I stick with shepherdís pie because you know what I figured that shepherdís probably didnít
eat lamb every night otherwise they wouldnít have any sheep left. Right?
So, shepherdís pie is basically some will say ground lamb with a bit of vegetable, onion
and carrots and some seasonings. Topped with mashed potatoes and then baked which is an
excellent meal for winter night, keeps you really nice and warm, very filing.
Lentils of course have lot of protein, they also have calcium in them and it really is
just a very yummy dinner. So, what weíre gonna start with is Iíve got my lentils cooked
at the back here and all I did with them was I took one cup of lentils and I think I put
two cups of water in there and then boil them, turn them down to simmer.
They take about half an hour, theyíre fairly fast cooking one so 20 minutes to half an
hour you should be good. Iíve also got my potatoes cooked here and what youíre looking
for with your potatoes is you want to make some small chunks, that size is what I find
perfect because if you make them bigger theyíre gonna take longer to cook but if you make
them smaller then really fall apart. And although weíre making mashed potatoes,
I donít know, I just like to keep my potatoes solid. So, you cover them with enough water
just to cover the potatoes, boil them until theyíre soft.
You tell that by sticking a fork in them and then what I do is I drain them off but leave
about half a cup of the cooking liquid because when you boil any vegetables some of their
nutrients are gonna leach out into the water so if you keep some of that water your gonna
keep some of the nutrients.
And a lot of people will, will do this with like say if itís a non vegan youíre gonna
use butter and milk right? I find mashed potatoes just fine with no milk and no butter. If you
want to do a vegan version you could use coconut oil if you want some fat. I donít find it
necessary, to be honest and you could also use rice milk or some other type of non dairy
milk and it will be just fine.
So Iíve got going here is Iím just mashing them with a masher. If you want a really smooth
potato, you could use the beaters or a hand blender, makes a really creamy fluffy potato
but for this I kinda want a little bit of chunkiness.
Iíve also left the skins in my potato because a lot of the nutrition in a vegetable is in
its skin and potato is no exception so if you leave the skin on them it also adds a
bit of color but primarily it adds nutrients.
And I havenít left quite enough of the cooking liquid for these potatoes in here so Iím
just gonna add a bit more water. When youíre draining them if you drain them into a little
bowl that would probably be even better and then if you need more liquid you can add it
back.
And the reason people add butter and milk to mashed potatoes is to make them creamy
but I find that the potato themselves are creamy and I really donít feel the need to
add any additional fat to them.
So once youíve got them mashed up, what you wanna do is seasoned them and I boil the potatoes
with a little bit of salt to the water just to help them cook but what you can add now
is just a touch of salt and I think Iíll do it with some ground pepper, just a bit.
If you want to add other flavors here you can maybe put some dill although thatís gonna
take away from the flavor of the shepherdsí pie tonight but if youíre making just mashed
potatoes you can add all kinds of flavors to them.
Thyme is the flavoring thatís going into the dish portion of the lentils so if you
wanted to add a seasoning to the potatoes you can add thyme but a traditional shepherdís
pie doesnít have any seasoning in the potatoes.
Once youíve get them mashed up you can set them aside, let them cool off a bit. Weíll
move on to the lentils.
So the lentils are fully cooked when they start to soften up and you can see some of
them are starting to breakdown from their skin here and thatís perfect so they are
fairly quick cooking but with lentils and any type of bean you wanna make sure that
when you boil them you do not use any salt because it will stop them from cooking properly.
So these guys I cooked with just water and no salt. Now I like to conserve dishes whenever
I can, now if thereís any liquid left at the bottom like any bit of liquid here thatís
ok. What weíre gonna do is Iím gonna use this pot that Iíve cooked the lentils in
to sautÈ the vegetables that are gonna go in the base.
And then rather than putting this in a bowl, what Iím gonna do is put it in the pie dish
that Iím using for the whole thing. That way Iím reusing the pot and Iíve got them
right in the pie dish so I donít need to waste a bowl mixing stuff up.
I could just mix them up in the pie dish and then spread the potatoes on top. Alright!
So moving on weíre going to get our vegetables going so Iím gonna turn this pot here onto
medium and once its heated up Iíll add a bit of
olive oil and then get the onion sautÈing.
And I use a fairly small pot for the lentils so its kinda small for the mass amount of
onion that I got here. You probably donít need these much onion and if you use a larger
pot it might ñ it might be better but anyway weíll work with it.
So just toss these onion around in the oil. This whole dish is going into the oven so
these onions are gonna get the chance to cook other than here but weíre gonna sautÈ them
briefly so that they crisp up a little bit and they heat their flavor.
And at this point I can get my oven going to preheat it so Iím going to put it on 350F.
Itís not crucial what temperature you use here anywhere from 300F ñ 400F is fine.
At 300F its gonna be a slower bake so things have more of a chance to dry out. At 400F
itís gonna be a faster bake so it takes less time but things are gonna get crispy on top
because it is hotter. Go figure!
Alright! So leave these onions for a few minutes, let the softened up and then weíll add the
carrots in there. So while theyíre cooking you could be dicing up your carrots. Once
those onions have softened up, itís time to add the carrots.
And we do the vegetables separately before we add them to the pot because otherwise theyíll
lose all of their flavors into the pot whereas if we sautÈ them first they maintain their
own flavors and then blend together rather than just leaching all their flavors on to
each other.
You want the flavor of the carrots and the flavor of the onion. Not the flavor of carronion
right?
Ok! So give that a stir, let the carrots have a few minutes on the heat. If you starts to
smell some carrot flavor coming off them theyíll be a little bit soft and then weíll be ready
to add seasonings.