"shepherd's" pie prep: meat sauce ready!

I'm making a sort-of shepherd's pie for the work luncheon this Friday. Got the meat sauce ready today. There were some compromises, though, and that's why this isn't a true shepherd's pie. First, the meat. A true shepherd's pie (unless it's the French version: hachis parmentier) uses ground lamb (which the Brits miscall "lamb mince" because they apparently don't know what to mince means) as the meat. My pie (and, really, it's more of a casserole than a pie) is a combination of ground lamb and home-ground beef. Yes, I broke out the grinder attachment for my stand mixer and ground up some beautiful skirt steak. Sheep and cow then met and melded in my bokkeum-pan before being transferred to my large, 15-liter pot, where the rest of the cooking occurred.

There were other compromises as well. Normally, your herbs for shepherd's pie will be primarily or exclusively rosemary and thyme, although different recipes may vary this. I discovered I had very little rosemary and thyme. I ground up the rosemary I had (it started off a little too long and toothpicky for my taste), combined it with the remaining thyme, then dumped it into the meat mixture after first draining away most of the fat (there are other liquids that you add as you go, so there was no danger of the meat drying out). I also added some oregano, a lot of parsley, some dried-onion flakes, some powdered garlic, some salt, and some pepper. For liquids, there's a whole bottle of passata di pomodoro (tomato purée), a bit of beef stock, some Worcestershire sauce, and a wee bit of a potato-starch slurry to keep things thick. I almost didn't need the potato starch. Oh, and the other compromises were (1) the addition of a bit of garam masala to give the lamb a breathy undertone, and (2) white wine instead of red. In my defense, I'll note that the wine had been given to me as a Christmas gift by my company, and the bottle had already been opened. I've got an unopened red sitting inside my fridge, but I'm saving that for when I next make boeuf bourguignon.

As compromised sauces go, though, the final effect was awesome. After having fasted for 24 hours (all of Wednesday), I helped myself, after midnight, to a couple bowlfuls of sauce (which was almost, but not quite, keto: potato starch is normally verboten for me). Delish. The meat sauce traditionally forms the bottom layer of the shepherd's pie.

There are a couple schools of thought about how to handle the other layers of the pie. Some people mix peas and carrots in with the meat, then layer on mashed potatoes, then top the whole thing with cheese: three layers. Some keep the meat and veggies separate, with everything else being the same: four layers. I'm more of a four-layer guy myself (Adam Ragusea likes to talk about heterogeneity), but I mixed in the mushrooms with the meat. So for my already-compromised pie, there'll be (1) a bottom meat layer, (2) a peas-and-carrots layer, (3) a mashed-potato layer, and (4) a cheese layer (English cheddar). Thursday night, I'll finish the pie up and bake it so that it's cool when I take it into work Friday morning.

Expect pics of the finished product soon.