Recipe of the Day: 30-Minute Shepherd’s Pie

Love It: Rachael Ray has another version of this recipe in one of her cookbooks that calls for ground turkey, which is the version I have made before. You have to really know what you’re doing to get one of her recipes done in 30 minutes or less, but they generally make for some tasty home cooking. Nice and comforting one here.

Fear It: I imagine part of the comfort in comfort foods is the food coma all the starch and fat sends you into post-dinner. To keep this reasonable, use reduced-fat versions of the dairy (sure to dismay Rachael) and meat, and take Rachael Ray’s suggestion to sub broth for cream. By the way, while you can use ground turkey for your meat, it won’t save you any calories over 95% lean beef unless you look for the ultra-lean ground turkey breast.

Teach It: This recipe uses a classic strategy of the 30-minute meals genre — do most of the cooking on the stovetop then pop the completed dish in a hot oven for just a few minutes to melt or brown the top.

Eat It: With a tall glass of milk and soft dinner rolls. No salad — too light!

30-Minute Shepherd’s Pie
Source: Rachael Ray
Yield: 4 generous servings

• 2 lbs. potatoes, such as russet, peeled and cubed
• 2 tablespoons sour cream or softened cream cheese
• 1 large egg yolk
• ½ cup cream, for a lighter version substitute vegetable or chicken broth
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, 1 turn of the pan
• 1 ¾ lbs. ground beef or ground lamb
• 1 carrot, peeled and chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 cup beef stock or broth
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire, eyeball it
• ½ cup frozen peas, a couple of handfuls
• 1 teaspoon sweet paprika
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves

Boil potatoes in salted water until tender, about 12 minutes. Drain potatoes and pour them into a bowl. Combine sour cream, egg yolk and cream. Add the cream mixture into potatoes and mash until potatoes are almost smooth.

While potatoes boil, preheat a large skillet over medium high heat. Add oil to hot pan with beef or lamb. Season meat with salt and pepper. Brown and crumble meat for 3 or 4 minutes. If you are using lamb and the pan is fatty, spoon away some of the drippings. Add chopped carrot and onion to the meat. Cook veggies with meat 5 minutes, stirring frequently. In a second small skillet over medium heat cook butter and flour together 2 minutes. Whisk in broth and Worcestershire sauce. Thicken gravy 1 minute. Add gravy to meat and vegetables. Stir in peas.

Preheat broiler to high. Fill a small rectangular casserole with meat and vegetable mixture. Spoon potatoes over meat evenly. Top potatoes with paprika and broil 6 to 8 inches from the heat until potatoes are evenly browned. Top casserole dish with chopped parsley and serve.

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Recipe of the Day: Back-From-the-Bar Snack

Love It: Potatoes? Eggs? Cheese? Bacon? You’ve convinced me.

Fear It: Yeah, all those South Beach diet people better steer clear, as I imagine the only approved food here would be the paltry teaspoon of oil. Sorry, folks.

Teach It: Lesson Number One: Adding bacon grease makes everything taste better. Lesson Number Two: Neat idea, using the peas’ water to heat the potatoes at the last minute.

Eat It: Alone in a dusky kitchen, with a beer from the fridge if that’s your thing.

Back-From-the-Bar Snack

Source: Nigella Lawson

Yield: 1 serving

• 2 (slices) rashers bacon, cut into little strips
• 1 teaspoon oil
• ½ cup frozen peas
• 2 cups cooked new or waxy potatoes
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup Cheddar, diced

Put some salted water on for the peas, and in a skillet that will take the potatoes and everything later, cook the bacon strips in the oil.

Cook the peas in the boiling water, and at the last minute, tip in the potatoes just so they heat up. Drain and turn into the pan with the bacon and take off the heat. Whisk the eggs with the cheese and then pour this over the potatoes and peas in the pan. Mix well and pour straight into a bowl to serve.

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Recipe of the Day: Turkey Meatloaf

Love It: The first ingredient is ketchup, and I need to catch up . . . anyway, I think the muffin shape is so cute I could just eat it right up! Not even figuratively, too.

Fear It: The cup of cheese counteracts the healthiness of the turkey somewhat. Reduced-fat cheese could help combat this.

Teach It: I’ve seen the muffin method in other meatloaf recipes. Advantages? Portion control, no worries about slicing difficulties, and plentiful crusty edges for everyone. Apply the method to your favorite meatloaf recipe.

Eat It: Mashed potatoes and sweet corn would be traditional comfort-food accompaniments. You could go all retro and make the potatoes from buds and get the corn from a can, or you could go all oddball-cute and frost your muffins with the potatoes and sprinkle corn on top, like I saw on Serious Eats the other day.

Turkey Meatloaf
Source: Martha Stewart via Yahoo Food
Yield: 6 servings

 

• ¾ cup ketchup
• 2 lbs. ground turkey
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 2 slices sandwich bread, torn into small pieces
• 1 cup grated Cheddar cheese
• ½ chopped dill pickle
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons dry mustard powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper

 

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, mix 1/2 cup ketchup with the remaining ingredients until well combined. Divide mixture among 6 cups of a 12-cup (4 ounce) muffin tin, spacing them evenly and gently compressing and mounding the tops. Brush tops with remaining 1/4 cup ketchup.
2. Transfer tin to oven; bake until inside temperature registers 170 degrees F on an instant read thermometer, about 45 minutes.
3. Remove from oven; let rest 5 minutes before removing from tin. Serve hot.

 

 

Nutritional notes:
Per Serving
* Calories: 419 kcal
* Carbohydrates: 16 g
* Dietary Fiber: 1 g
* Fat: 22 g
* Protein: 37 g
* Sugars: 5 g

 

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Cottage Cheese Mac

I have a secret shame.

 

I love macaroni and cheese from the blue box.

 

Okay, nowadays I prefer the blue box that says “Deluxe” to the original Cheese and Macaroni, but nonetheless, I truly enjoy elbows or shells coated in a processed cheese sauce.

 

Velveeta Shells and Cheese, Kraft Deluxe, Annie’s — it doesn’t matter which. As long as it comes with a packet of cheesy goo, it’s okay with me!

 

Although, come to think of it, the boxes with powder have their merits, too. When the grocery budget has dwindled, those 50-cent meals look mighty appetizing. Plus with the powder kind you have more control over how much fat goes into the sauce (always skim milk and skimpy butter).

 

Of course, I do have a reasonable argument for my dependence on packaged mac and cheese. It’s simple.

 

All recipes for the homemade stuff I’ve ever tried suck. Big time.

 

Alton Brown’s casserole is mostly flavorless and often comes out grainy (although it is tasty when deep fried). Paula Deen’s baked mac is greasy, clumpy, and again, mostly flavorless. These are the two most prominent disasters in my memory, but no recipe I’ve tried has produced results that could compete with the boxed stuff for punch. Rather, they taste as insipid as the Stouffer’s frozen cheesy mac my mom stocked before I could cook for myself.

 

Obviously, we’re coming in a roundabout way now to the recipe that is the exception to the rule.

 

I found a recipe that called for incorporating cottage cheese and sour cream into macaroni and cheese on Art Smith’s Back to the Table blog at Yahoo Food.

 

Now, as I am in Slovakia for the next several months, I had to improvise a bit with this recipe. Cheddar cheese is pricey in these parts; for the same price you can can two to four times as much Edam, Gouda or Emmentaler. Also, everything is measured in metric over here, so I can buy cottage cheese in either 180-gram or 150-gram tubs; no cups or ounces.

 

I decided too that I wanted to add a bit of one of my favorite flavors to the sauce, so I picked up one tub of cottage cheese with chives along with a plain tub. The herbal flecks made the finished dish look a bit prettier, as it turned out.

 

This mac and cheese came at me with knock-my-socks-off flavor. Yum, yum, yum! I think the extra acidity from the sour cream and cottage cheese helped kick the cheesy flavor up, and the touch of chives added some interest to a normally bland dish.

 

Some tips now.

 

Here, I am kind of stuck with whatever’s on the shelves as far as dairy goes. Reduced-fat blocks of cheese don’t seem to exist. Products aren’t required to have nutritional information, so often they don’t. Also, whereas in America you might be offered sour cream in nonfat, low-fat, and full-fat varieties, here you are likely only to find one type (and hopefully you pick up the soured “smotana” as opposed to the fresh-from-the-cow kind, which come in pretty much the same packages).

 

Thus, I suggest making this a healthier dish if you live somewhere with a variety of dairy products by subbing in lower-cal versions. I myself usually like to go the middle-of-the-road low-fat route. The nutrition stats in the recipe, though, are for the highest fat products you might use.

 

In addition, go ahead and take a page from the Volumetrics diet — stir in some warmed veggie mix from the freezer to stretch the dish, increasing the nutrients but reducing the calories per serving. You’ll feel full on less cheese that way. For lunch the next day, I stirred in the leftover peas, corn, and carrots from dinner, and it was lovely.

 

Finally, don’t give up if it looks like the cheese is not melting right away. It takes several minutes of stirring to get those cottage cheese curds to meld with the sauce, but trust me, they will eventually.

 

Cottage Cheese Mac
Source: Colleen Fischer
Yield: 6 servings

• 2 cups elbow macaroni, (about 7 ounces)
  
• 1 large egg, beaten
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese with chives
  
• ¾ cup sour cream
  
• 1 teaspoon table salt, plus more for the macaroni water
  
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
  
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
  
• 1 ½ cups Emmentaler cheese, shredded (about 7 ounces)
  

Boil a large pot of water. Add salt to taste and the macaroni. Cook until just before al dente, as the pasta will cook more in the cheese sauce.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, cottage cheeses, sour cream, salt, garlic powder, and pepper thoroughly in a medium bowl. Stir in the shredded cheese.

Drain the macaroni and return it to the hot pot, off the heat. Add the cheese mixture to the pot and fold it in with a rubber spatula. Return the pot to the burner over low heat, stirring gently and constantly for about 5 minutes, or until the shredded cheese and almost all of the cottage cheese melts. This will also gently cook the egg in the sauce. Don’t rush it — too much heat will not yield a nice, creamy sauce!

Take the pot off the heat and allow it to sit for about 5 minutes to thicken. Serve warm.

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