This recipe scales up very well. Make a huge batch and enjoy the fruits of your labour. Also includes a recipe for making your own Worcestershire sauce.

Time: 4/5
Took about 3 hours, although oven time is passive.

Effort: 4/5
It’s fortunate that this yielded so many meals, or it would nearly be not worth the effort.

A Big Bake

Every now and then I like to venture out of my comfort zone and try meal prepping with something other than rice as the base carb. Sometimes it’s sweet potatoes, sometimes it’s a pasta salad.

But a recent grocery haul netted me some cheap ground beef and some cheap potatoes, along with an itch to use the oven for something other than the many, many chicken thighs and rice recipes I have on this blog.

Which is how I ended up with this cottage pie. So called because it’s made of beef instead of lamb like a Shepherd’s pie, but as far as I can tell they’re basically the same recipe.

It was a lot of work putting the casserole from scratch, although I imagine you would have a much easier time if you started with some leftover cooked potatoes. I’m still happy with the results, and we enjoyed this huge pie again and again in the next few days. This is also the sort of recipe that tastes better the next day and freezes super well – go big or go home, I guess.

Another stellar achievement of this recipe was how I was able to essentially make my own Worcestershire sauce using ingredients I already had in my pantry. I don’t use it often enough to justify a purchase, so I reverse engineered it from the listed ingredients. I must have gotten reasonably close, because I couldn’t taste the difference in the final product.

Plus, I’m super proud that I actually weighed the ingredients involved! I know some of you get frustrated that I never tell you the quantities and amounts of my recipes. That’s because I don’t know! The exact proportions rarely matter, and I am a firm believer that you should adjust the recipe to your liking.

But here we are with this blog’s first fully quantified recipe. Because I don’t own a roasting tray or anything else to bake the cottage pie in, I went and got a huge disposable aluminium tray – incidentally, the same type I use to make steamed radish cakes for the Lunar New Year. Which meant I needed to know how much stuff I am cooking, to know how big of a tray I needed to buy.

I hope that makes some of you happy. This cottage pie certainly made me happy, after I got it in the oven!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 1

Dramatis Personae

• 1250 ground beef
• 5 large potatoes, about 1600g 
• 1 onion, about 100g
• Half a large carrot, about 200g
• 100g shredded mozzarella
• 100g shredded Parmesan 
• 1 tbsp Better than Bouillon reduced sodium beef broth base

Cottage pie is a great chance to clear out your pantry and your fridge, so feel free to throw in whichever odds and ends you want. Green peas are also a great addition, but my SO hates them with a passion so that’s never going to happen. Which is such a pity, I guess I will have to save recipes like keema matar for when she’s not around.

DIY Worcestershire sauce 

• Fish sauce
• Tamarind paste
• Molasses
• White distilled vinegar

I lied when I said this was a fully quantified recipe earlier. I fell into my old habits here and just added some of everything and adjusted until the sauce was tangy and savoury. It took quite a bit of vinegar to get it where I wanted, because tamarind is quite sweet in addition to being acidic. So, play around with the proportions until you like it. 

It makes sense for me to Frankenstein my own Worcestershire sauce, because I keep tamarind paste and fish sauce around for recipes like Tom Yum Kung. Your pantry situation may vary, so maybe just buy yourself a bottle of proper Worcestershire sauce like a normal person.

• 900g haricot verts

Always eat your veggies! I picked haricots because I can blanch them in the potato water and save myself some dishes, and also because they were cheap. It’s also nice to have a more simple side dish when the main course is so rich.

Executive summary

1. Bring salted water to a boil. Wash, peel and cube the potatoes.
2. Blanch haricot verts in salted water for a few minutes, then reserve.
3. Simmer potatoes in the same pot for about 30 minutes, or until tender. In the meantime, wash and cut the carrot and onion.
4. Reserve potatoes and allow to cool. Clean the pan, and brown the beef.
5. Stir in the carrot and onion, and continue to cook until fragrant.
6. Add Worcestershire sauce, Better than Bouillon, and a bit of water. Taste and adjust, then simmer uncovered for about 15 minutes.
7. In the meantime, mash the potatoes and mix in half of the cheese. Season mashed potatoes. Preheat the oven to 200c/400F
8. Once the meat mixture is done, pour it into the baking tray. Spoon mashed potatoes on top and smooth it out.
9. Top the mashed potatoes with the rest of the cheese, and bake for about 20 minutes or until the cheese is browned.
10. Allow to cool for about 20 minutes before slicing and serving.

Play by Play

Last things first. I’m bringing salted water to a boil while I wash the haricot verts.

While the haricots were being blanched, I scrubbed and cut my potatoes. The size doesn’t matter, since everything is going to be mashed up. I’m using the same water to cook the potatoes, since it’s hot already.

This leaves the cutting board free for me to dice up the onion and carrot.

Once potatoes are tender, I reserved them and allowed them to steam off any extra moisture.

Beef in the pan, break up with wooden spoon or spatula. Once they get some colour, I added the onion and carrot.

Once the vegetables have softened a bit, I started seasoning the mixture with Better than Bouillon and the ersatz Worcestershire sauce. This all gets simmered uncovered, to let the sauce reduce.

Which is perfect timing to make mashed potatoes. I don’t have a masher, so I used a fork and this too-small bowl. Mildly infuriating. Once mashed, the potatoes get salted, peppered, cheesed and tasted.

Aluminium tray at the ready. The meat mixture was done as I mashed the potatoes, and they go on the bottom. Mash gets dolloped on top and smoothed out into one layer. I made some ridges with the fork because surface area is flavour, and also cheesed the top.

Into the preheated oven. Everything is cooked here, so all I need to do is brown the top. I’m cleaning the countertop and doing some dishes in the meantime.

About 20 minutes later, and the top is looking absolutely gorgeous. Time to lay the table, while this cools down a bit.

Looks amazing, tastes better. Surprisingly good for how simple it is.

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