Shepherd's pie

I've only had this dish in my adult life. My mom never made it, and I think it's probably a mid-Western thing, so I only recently added it to my dinner experiences. Yesterday, I decided to actually make it for the first time. I had a thawed pound of turkey meat in the fridge and didn't want to make pasta or turkey burgers again so I searched for other recipes that use ground turkey and decided on the "pie."

But, naturally, I didn't have the right ingredients for the recipe I found. It called for ground beef, first off, but no big deal. I normally sub turkey meat for things. I had most of the other ingredients, except beef bullion granules. "That can't be good," I thought to myself. When I finally found them at the store and read the ingredients list on the back, I couldn't bring myself to buy them. I don't know if they're necessarily bad for you, but it just didn't look quite right. So I didn't get them and ran the risk of ruining dinner. But I had organic chicken broth at home and figured I could just add that for moisture and flavour.

I also went the "hard" route and decided to make the potato topping from scratch instead of using instant potatoes. But when I pulled out my bag of potatoes, I saw that they had all gone soft and started to sprout. Thankfully, I had two sweet potatoes on hand. I also decided it was weird that the potato recipe called for adding in carrots and cheese. So instead, I added the carrots to the meat mixture and put the cheese on top of the sweet potatoes.

The whole thing was relatively easy! Beyond the turkey meat, I followed the pie recipe, and I'm pretty sure that for a potato topping you can do whatever you want. I liked the flavour that the sweet potatoes added to the dish, because normal potatoes are pretty bland. And I just used the chicken broth here and there to keep the meat moist while cooking. I baked it at 400 degrees for 15 minutes and voila! (I'm not exactly meeting my slow cooking goal this month, by the way, but I'll keep trying!)