Made from Scratch Shepherd's Pie

I love comfort food and I love finding new ways to make it.  For Mark and I, Shepherd's Pie is normally something we will have when we go out to a restaurant but it is not even remotely difficult to make.  Here's my super simple recipe for really tasty Shepherd's Pie.

Made from Scratch Shepherd’s Pie

3 lbs                      Lean Ground Beef

2 cups                   Gravy (I used Low Sodium Gravy Mixes – 2 packets worth)

8                           Yellow fleshed potatoes

¼ cup                    Garlic butter

1 tbsp                    Parmesan & Herbs Seasoning

2 tbsp                    Worcestershire sauce, divided

1 tbsp                    Pepper

2 cups                   Mini carrots, chopped into bite size pieces

2 tbsp                    Balsamic Vinaigrette

¾ cup                    Parmesan cheese, grated

¼ cup                    Goat cheese, plain

¼ cup                    Maple cheddar, shredded

¼ cup                    Milk

PINCH                 Habanero Salt

I started out by steaming the mini carrots in the microwave.  In a microwaveable safe container, add in your carrots and 1 tbsp of water.  Microwave on HIGH for 4 minutes.  When the carrots are finished in the microwave, remove them and chop them into bite size pieces.  Hold to one side until the ground beef is finished cooking.

Next go on to making the gravy for this.  Simply follow the package directions to make the gravy and then once it is bubbling away, add in half of the Worcestershire sauce and the Parmesan and Herbs Seasoning to the mixture in the saucepan.

At the same time, start browning all of the ground beef in a large frying pan.  Once the meat is cooked through, drain off the fat and then return to the heat.  At this point, add in the Parmesan cheese, the remaining Worcestershire Sauce, the carrots, the Balsamic Vinaigrette and the gravy.

Chop the potatoes into medium size chunks and put them into another saucepan.  Also start a filled kettle boiling with water.  Once the potatoes are chopped and the water is boiled, start the potatoes cooking over high heat on the stove top.  Once the water is boiling, with the lid on, lower the temperature to low and set the timer for 5 minutes. 

Stir the ground beef mixture and start preparing your baking dish for the oven by spraying it with non-stick cooking spray.

Turn the oven on to 350°F.

Once the five minutes is up on the timer, drain the water from the potatoes and return the potatoes to the saucepan.  Add in the garlic butter, milk and goat cheese to the potatoes.  Using a masher, smash the potatoes until they are very smooth.

Pile the meat mixture into the base of the prepared baking dish.  Now it is time to add the potatoes on top.  You have a couple of options on how you want to do this.  The simple way would be to spread a layer of mashed potatoes on top but if you want to make it look fancy, using a piping bag and the largest star tip you have, pipe rosettes of mashed potatoes onto the top of the beef mixture.  Just a side note: Take your time with this step, especially if you have arthritis in your hands, as this gives your hands quite a beating.  It took me approximately 15 minutes to pipe all of these rosettes because I had to keep taking breaks. 

Having said that, the final product does look quite amazing when you sit down to enjoy it because you did take the time to make it look good.

Now it’s time to heat the mixture through completely and brown the potatoes.  This takes approximately 20 minutes at which time you will remove it from the oven, turn the oven to the broil setting, top the shepherd’s pie with the maple cheddar and return it to the oven to melt the cheese and allow it to start to bubble.  This will only take about 90 seconds so keep an eye on the oven at this point.  Once it has started to bubble, remove the Shepherd’s Pie from the oven and sprinkle the top with Habanero Salt.  Let it cool slightly before serving – don’t worry, the heat trapped beneath the potatoes will not allow your dinner to cool down significantly and will prevent you from burning your mouth off.

Makes 6 servings

Leftover cake...what to do with it

Isn't it always the case that when you have a cake, whether it be birthday, anniversary or wedding, there is always leftovers and you are sick and tired of eating cake?  I get like that quite easily - I think it comes from having the last of six birthdays in the month of December and Christmas along with it - so when Mark and I ended up with a ton of wedding cake left over after our big day, I started to think about exactly what we were going to do with it.

Our wedding cake was a four tier cake made by my cousin and each layer was something different.  After the wedding was all done, we divided it up, wrapped some of it in tin foil, took the top layer and froze it in the freezer and put it aside for another day.  Last week I decided I wanted to do some baking and, while I had an idea of what to do with the cake, I was not exactly sure how to go about doing this.  A few years ago, the big thing was cupcakes...now it has become cake pops.  At the time, I was not a huge fan of the cupcake phase but when cake pops came along I loved the idea of it.  To me, it was just the right amount of cake to me and they could be decorated in a million different ways.  However, instead of doing cake pops, I thought "let's do mini cake bites".  You see, cake pops are made from scratch and baked in the oven and we already had baked cake to work with.  While I probably could add the cake pop stick, by doing mini cake bites, it removed the extra step and the number of extras I would have to pick up to make these.  You see, I regularly have baking chocolate and/or chocolate chips around the house.  I also had sprinkles and coloured sugars kicking around as well to decorate the coated cake bites with.  Everything I needed was in the house - I just needed the time to make them.

So, with all the ingredients ready and the cake completely thawed, I set about to make these mini cake bites.  The leftover cake I was using was a slab of marble pound cake that was 2" wide by 12" long and 4" high.  There was a layer of fondant icing surrounding it and there was a layer of filling halfway between the cake.  It had been in the freezer for several months so I let it take two days to thaw completely.  Once it was thawed, it was time to make the cake bites.  I piled the cake, breaking it down with my hands, into a mixing bowl and then mixed it all together so that it was one large helping of cake batter with the icing and filling

holding it all together. One thing I would recommend is using gloves when you are doing this - rolling the cake batter into balls can be quite messy and, since the icing on our cake was sprayed a bright blue colour, it prevented my counters from changing colours while I was working with the cake.  Depending on the size of the cake bites and the amount of leftover cake you are working with will determine how many mini cake bites you end up with.  In the end, we had 40 mini cake bites which I laid out on a parchment paper lined rimmed baking sheet to dry just a bit.  This should only take about 20 minutes.  What you are looking for is the outside of the cake pop being slightly hardened but still easy to squeeze.

Next step is to coat the cake bites in chocolate.  This time around, because we had dark chocolate in the house, I used a combination of 4 Dark Chocolate squares and half an open bag of dark chocolate chips.  When it comes to melting chocolate, you need to use indirect heat so I set up a water bath (bain marie) using my largest saucepan and a metal mixing bowl.  To get the chocolate squares to melt quickly, I took a

knife through them so that they were in small chunks or chards of chocolate.  At this point, set up another rimmed baking sheet but instead of the parchment paper, this time rest a wire baking rack inside the baking sheet.  This will allow any excess chocolate to drip down onto the sheet but not adhere the entire cake pop to the baking sheet.  Once I had the water in the saucepan up to a rolling boil, I lowered the temperature to a simmer and added the mixing bowl of chocolate to the top and, with a spatula, started moving the chocolate around until it melted completely.  I removed the mixing bowl from the water bath and then started coating the cake bites in chocolate.  Do this one by one so that when you are removing each coated cake bite from the chocolate, it is easy to remove excess chocolate.  Once you have finished coating each cake bite in chocolate and they are resting on the baking sheet, take the decorations (i.e. sprinkles, coloured sugar, etc) and start topping each cake bite as you want.  Have fun with this and, if you have kids around, get them to help out too.

Once you have decorated all of your cake pops, move them to another room to chill quickly so that the chocolate hardens.  If you have room in your fridge that works but, since I didn't have room there, I moved it to a room downstairs where it was colder than the main floor was.  It will only take 20 minutes for these to harden and then you can store them in an airtight container or cookie jar.

What Does Comfort Food Mean To You???

Comfort food can mean such a wide variety of things - peanut butter and jam sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, mac and cheese...The possibilities are endless and they can vary just as much from culture to culture as person to person.  Even for me, sometimes it is homemade mac and cheese, sometimes it is chicken soup and sometimes it is those crescent roll things that my Mom used to put a hot dog weiner in and make us for lunch.

Earlier this week, as Mark and I were out doing a grocery shopping, we were trying to figure out what to make for dinner that night.  We were in the refrigerated section picking up juice and milk when I saw the crescent rolls and it started my mind turning.  Initially I thought, since we don't really eat hot dogs in our house, of taking sausage (which I knew we had in the freezer) and make crescent dogs.  Then I thought, what if I chop up the sausage before I cook it, to make it look like ground meat instead, and stuff that inside a crescent roll with cheese and some spices?  So...a new recipe was born.

The freezer revealed some Turkey Bratwurst sausages so that is what we used to make this recipe.  Any type of sausage would work though.

Spicy Sausage Crescent Roll Ups

6                          Sausages, uncooked & chopped

3 tbsp                  Red wine vinegar

3 tbsp                  Worcestershire sauce

2 tbsp                  Cajun seasoning

2 tbsp                  Greek seasoning

4 tbsp                  Parmesan cheese, grated

3 tbsp                  Hot BBQ Sauce

4-5 dashes           Hot Sauce (I used Tabasco)

2 containers        Crescent rolls

8 slices                Brie (or another creamy style cheese)

¼ cup                  Marble cheese, shredded

PINCH                Habanero Salt

Start by chopping up the sausages into small pieces for frying in a frying pan.

In a mixing bowl, combine the chopped up sausage with the vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, Cajun and Greek seasonings and Parmesan cheese.  Allow to marinate together for a couple of hours.

Drain any excess liquid that forms in the mixing bowl and add the meat mixture to a frying pan over medium high heat.

Cook the meat mixture until cooked through, draining off any excess liquid as necessary.  Add the hot BBQ sauce and the hot sauce to the mixture once cooked through and mix to coat while in the frying pan.

In the meantime, turn on the oven and start preheating it to 375°F.

Lay out your crescent rolls and add the two types of cheese and the habanero salt to the roll up.

Once the meat is fully cooked and seasoned to taste, divide the meat mixture evenly amongst the crescent rolls.  If there is leftover meat, use some as a garnish on the top of the roll up once they have been rolled.

Roll the crescent rolls up, tucking in the ends as you roll them up.

Set on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. 

Pop it into the oven and allow to cook for 15-17 minutes.

Makes 8 rollups

Sauces Made From Scratch

It is really rare for Mark and I to have a store bought sauce in the house - I love making homemade sauces instead because it fills the house with wonderful smells, allows us to control what ingredients are going into our diet and they can always be made well in advance and frozen.  We end up with a bunch sitting in our freezer when I make a batch of whatever sauce we want and, in a pinch.

I have high blood pressure so, for me, it is very important to keep the salt intake low and both Mark and I try to keep our weight in check.  The last thing we want to do is spend money on clothes because ours have stopped fitting.  There are much better things in life to spend our hard earned dollars on...

Today I am going to share with you my recipe for my home made meat sauce which I made a batch of just last week.  I may even throw in my cheese sauce recipe at the bottom although I don't have any pictures of the cheese sauce at the moment.

I think the part I love the most about making home made sauces like this is the prep pulling everything together - browning the meat, chopping up the tomatoes, tasting it to adjust the seasonings, etc...all of these steps are a chance to add flavour, play with the final outcome and create something truly satisfying.

For this batch of sauce I used field tomatoes for the recipe but Plum tomatoes work just as well.  Pretty much any type of tomato that looks good in the supermarket that is a reasonable price will work for this recipe.

I like to add a little bit of lemon zest to the tomatoes - it lifts the flavour of the beef and the tomatoes and gives it another dimension.  If you do not have a zester itself, take a vegetable peeler and peel off a couple of large strips of lemon peel and then finely cut them into strips like below.

I do recommend using extra lean ground beef when making this recipe - lean or medium ground beef throws off too much fat I find and then you'll be draining that off for what seems like forever instead of making your sauce.

Once this has started to come together, it is time to add the liquids.  I use a combination of red wine and low sodium beef stock when I make this sauce along with a few other seasonings.  It is this combination that makes the house start to smell so yummy, especially since once you have added this in, you just let the mixture sit and work its magic for a couple of hours.

Homemade Meat Sauce

4 (large)               Field tomatoes, chopped into chunks

1 (large)               Lemon, zest and juice of

2 tsp                      Salt, divided

2 tsp                      Pepper, divided

3 lbs                       Extra lean ground beef

3 tbsp                    Greek seasoning

3 tbsp                    Onion flakes

3 tbsp                    Sundried Tomato & Herb seasoning

1 ½ cups               White wine

¼ cup                    Worcestershire sauce

8-10 dashes        Hot sauce (I used Tabasco)

2 cups                   Red wine

7 ½ cups               Low Sodium Beef Broth

Start by chopping up your tomatoes into large chunks and put them aside into a mixing bowl.  Next, zest your lemon and then cut the lemon in half to squeeze the juice out.   If you do not have a zester, take your vegetable peeler and cut off strips of lemon peel and then chop into small slivers.  Add the zest to the tomatoes and then squeeze the juice of the lemon over the tomatoes.  Add 1 tsp each salt and pepper to the bowl and then toss the tomatoes and lemon in the salt and pepper.

Now it’s time to brown the ground beef.  Add all of the ground beef to a large stock pot and cook it over medium heat until completely browned.  Drain the fat from the meat and return the meat to the stock pot. 

Return the meat to the heat and add the rest of the salt and pepper as well as the Greek seasoning, Onion flakes, Sundried Tomato and Herb seasoning, White Wine, Worcestershire sauce and Hot sauce.  Cook for 5 minutes and then taste the meat to see if there is enough seasoning and flavour to it. 

Adjust the seasonings as necessary and then add in your tomato mixture.  Put the lid on the pot and lower the heat down to medium low.  Let it cook and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring once or twice, until the tomatoes start to break down.

Now add in your red wine and beef broth.  This is why you need to have a large stock pot as, at this point, there is going to be a lot of liquid.   Turn the heat up to medium high, cover the stock pot with the lid once more and let this go.  Check on it every 30-45 minutes and give it a good stir but it is going to take about 2 hours for a lot of this liquid to reduce.

Once the sauce is ready, I divide it between freezer proof containers, let it cool down to room temperature and then put it away in the freezer.

Makes 10 cups

As an alternative – if you want to hold aside some of this sauce and keep it going for another 30-45 minutes at the same heat and keep it going until all the liquid is gone.  This makes an amazing topper on nachos or for tacos when all of the liquid is gone.

This was taken when the sauce had reduced by about half.  If you look at the orange line near the top of the stock pot, that was where it originally started.  Now, like I promised earlier, I am also going to share my homemade cheese sauce recipe with you.  When I make this next I will take some photos and share them with you here.

Made from Scratch Cheese Sauce

2 tbsp                    All purpose flour

2 tbsp                    Margarine

PINCH                   Salt

PINCH                   Pepper

3 cups                   Milk

1 ½ cups               Low Sodium Chicken Broth

6-8 dashes          Hot sauce

1 cup                     Parmesan cheese, grated

2 cups                   Swiss cheese, shredded

2 cups                   Old cheddar cheese, shredded

In a large saucepan, combine the flour and margarine over medium heat and stir until butter is melted and completely incorporated into the flour.

Add salt and pepper.

As the roux is just starting to brown, with a whisk, stir in chicken broth and milk. 

Stirring constantly, let this mixture come together and start to thicken, about 5-7 minutes.

At this point, switch from a whisk to a wooden spoon.

Add in the cheeses in the order listed, stirring after each cheese is added, until it is incorporated fully.

It is important to stir this regularly so that it does not stick to the bottom of the pan and burn.  The sauce is ready when it is thickened and coats the back of the wooden spoon.

Makes 4 cups

Zesty Three Beef Stew

Zesty Three Beef Stew

It is fall and fall always seems to say Stew to me...but Mark and I wanted something different than a regular stew.  We had these two full racks of beef ribs in the freezer that we didn't use during the summer because of the amount of fat on the racks and we had some stewing cubes that were sitting in the freezer dying of loneliness.  We hate to throw food out and I was already planning on making some meat sauce already so we decided to do a beef stew in the slow cooker while the meat sauce was bubbling away in the stock pot on the stove next to it.  

Zesty Three Beef Stew

2 racks                  Beef ribs

½ lb                       Beef stewing cubes

½ cup                    Red wine

½ tsp                     Salt

1 tsp                      Pepper, divided

1 lb                        Extra lean ground beef, cooked & drained of fat

5-6 dashes            Hot sauce (I used Tabasco)

10-12 dashes        Worcestershire sauce

¾ tsp                    Onion flakes

¾ tsp                    Piri Piri seasoning

3 ½ cups               Low sodium Chicken Broth

2 cups                   Hot Salsa

2 cups                   Marinara sauce

4 (large)               Carrots, chopped into chunks

8                           Red Potatoes, chopped into chunks

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Beef ribs tend to have a lot of fat on them so we need to start by parboiling them in the oven to render off a lot of the fat.  In two large Pyrex dishes each lined with aluminum foil, lay each rack of ribs.  Fill halfway up the sides with water and parboil the ribs for 2 ¼ to 2 ½ hours until they are cooked through and a lot of the fat has been rendered off.

While the ribs are parboiling, cook both the stewing cubes and the ground beef in two separate frying pans.  In one frying pan over medium heat, place the stewing beef and start to cook it until it gets a nice crust on all sides.  Add the salt, ½ tsp pepper and the red wine to the pan.  Continue to cook an additional 7-10 minutes until the cubes are cooked through.

In a second frying pan also over medium heat, add the ground beef, Worcestershire sauce, Hot sauce, ½ tsp pepper, onion flakes and Piri Piri.  Brown the meat until completely cooked through.  Drain the fat from the pan and put both the stewing cubes and the ground beef to one side.

Once the beef ribs are cooked through, the meat needs to be stripped from the bones and any remaining fat needs to be removed from the meat.  The meat on the ribs will naturally shred in your hands as you are removing it from the bones which is what you want it to do. 

Once that is done, you are ready to take this all to the slow cooker.  Start by adding all of your meats to the slow cooker.  Next add in the Marinara sauce and the hot salsa.  Star the slow cooker, set it to low and, if it is a programmable slow cooker, set it to 6 hours.

Once the slow cooker is going, peel and chop the carrots and chop up the potatoes.  With the potatoes, leave the skin on – there’s a lot of flavour in the skins.  Once the first hour has passed with the slow cooker, add in both the carrots and potatoes at that point and let the slow cooker continue to work its magic.

At the end of the 6 hours, if the mixture still looks more like a soup than a stew, remove a few chunks of potato and carrot and mash them in a mixing bowl.  At this point you also want to check the taste and adjust the seasonings, if necessary.  When I made this I added some more pepper, onion flakes and Piri Piri but didn’t need to add any of the sauces.  Return them to the slow cooker, turn it up to high, and let it go for another 45 minutes. 

Makes 6-8 servings, depending on your serving size

This makes a lot of food so if it is just the two of you, like it is for Mark and I, break out the storage containers and pop some in the freezer for a rainy day.  Enjoy,

That's A Spicy Meatball!

I'm a big pasta lover - absolutely love the stuff.  I tend to go towards chicken or fish when I create a pasta dish but every now and then there's something truly satisfying about meatballs and pasta.  That is what precipitated this recipe - Mark and I wanted pasta and meatballs.  Now I did this with a whole wheat penne  and a very unorthodox sauce made of salsa, some balsamic vinegar and cheese but the star of this show was definitely the made from scratch baked meatballs.  Check out the recipe below:

That’s A Spicy Meatball

2 lbs                    Lean Ground Beef

½ cup                  Breadcrumbs

¼ cup                  Italian Seasoning

1 (large)              Egg

¼ cup                  Worcestershire Sauce

3 tbsp                  Hot Sauce (I used Franks)

PINCH                Salt

PINCH                Pepper

¼ cup                  Parmesan cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 350°F and place a wire rack that has been sprayed with cooking spray inside a rimmed baking sheet.

Combine all the ingredients except the Parmesan cheese in a large mixing bowl.  Put some gloves on and get dirty – start rolling up the meat into regular size meatballs.  This recipe should give you 16 regular size meatballs so judge accordingly as you are pinching the meat off.  As you finish each meatball, place it on the prepared baking sheet and rack and keep going until all the meat has been rolled into balls.

Before popping the meatballs into the preheated oven, sprinkle a bit of Parmesan cheese over each meatball.

Pop the tray of meatballs into the oven and cook for 20-25 minutes.  This will give you medium well in terms of internal temperature so, if you want well done meatballs, leave them in the oven for an extra couple of minutes.

Makes 16 regular meatballs but you could certainly make double this amount in mini meatballs.

There are so many possibilities for these meatballs.  Use them with your favourite pasta dish, make a soup with them...Beef Stroganoff would be great with these or make them smaller and use them as an appetizer - Waikiki Meatballs anyone?  Hey, if you have any suggestions on how you like to use meatballs with your meals, feel free to add it in the comments.

If you want to make a batch ahead of time and freeze them, bring them up to room temperature before using and toss them into a frying pan to brown them up a little bit before serving.

Spicy Queso Taters

Just a simple side dish to start out this new blog.  Mark and I had found a stuffed turkey breast over the weekend at our local grocery store and decided to make it for dinner Tuesday night.  We just steamed some veggies to go with it the first night but I had a few leftovers sitting in the fridge that I wanted to incorporate somehow so that we didn't have to throw them out in the garbage.  As a side note, I love creating dips to bring out when we have company over.  As we progress you will see this come out but the leftovers sitting in the fridge was a Queso dip I made at home because certain family members, myself included, love "liquid cheese" with nachos.  The result of this dish is what Mark and I decided to call Spicy Queso Taters - it reminds me of home fries but instead of onion and peppers and heated up in a frying pan, it became salami bites, cheese and spices baked off in the oven.  Sorry for the lack of photos on this one - the idea to start this came well after dinner was done and cleaned up.  I will take photos the next time I create a recipe :)

Spicy Queso Taters

6                           Mini potatoes, halved & cut into bite size chunks

12 slices                Salami, cut into tiny bite size pieces

                             Salt

                             Pepper

                             Louisiana Hot & Spicy Seasoning

¼ cup                    Homemade Queso Dip (see other recipe)

¼ cup                    Habanero Cheese Blend, shredded

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In an oven proof dish, combine all ingredients together.

Toss together to incorporate the Queso dip so that all potatoes are covered evenly.

Cook in oven for 40-45 minutes or until potatoes are cooked through and tender.

Makes 4 servings

Here is the recipe for the Queso Dip as well:

Ingredients:

2 8-ounce packages cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 cups grated Monterey Jack cheese
2 cups grated Parmesan
2 plum tomatoes, chopped into bite size pieces

1 jalapeno, seeds removed & chopped into bite size pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Add all of the ingredients to a large bowl and mix well to combine.
Spread cheese into an 8x8 baking dish and bake for 20 minutes or until hot and bubbly.
Serve with tortilla chips.

Credit where credit is due -   I found this recipe on Pinterest. It is called Creamy White Queso Dip originally adapted from someone called Reckless Abandon. Due to availability of certain items in the grocery store, I did make a few changes.