Friend of Julie: Shepherd's Pie

This dish comes from a recipe Emilia shared with us when we were at her restaurant, Roma (in East Hartford, CT). Her recipe uses butternut squash instead of potato and this dish is incredible!

Shepherd's Pie with butternut squash instead of potato

As always, watch your meat-veggie ratio (more meat or equal meat-veggies).

Ingredients

• 1 small butternut squash
• 1 medium onion diced
• 3-4 cloves of minced garlic
• ½ cup shredded carrot (or 1 carrot sliced; optional)
• 1 1/4 pound of ground beef
• ½ cup frozen corn
• 1 tablespoon butter
• salt (optional)
• black pepper

Adjust these ingredients to suit your needs. My mom never added carrots when she made this dish, but I liked this extra flavor. Anyway you make this dish, be sure to have an equal amount of meat to veggies or less veggies than meat.

Directions

1. Cook butternut squash and then mash; add salt and pepper to your taste.
   You may bake the squash and remove the seeds and then either mash the squash by hand or with food processor. I bought half of a large already peeled squash at the store, cut it into smaller pieces, steamed it, and then put it in my food processor.
2. Add the butter to a heated skillet and immediately add the diced onion, minced garlic, and carrot (optional). 
3. Stay with this and keep stirring. I melted the butter while cutting the veggies and had to toss the butter because it burned.
4. After the onion is cooked, add the ground meat and brown.
5. Drain the meat mixture and then place evenly in a casserole dish. There is no need to oil or butter the dish.
6. Add the corn on top of the meat layer. I only used 2/3 of the bag.
7. Spread all of the mashed butternut squash on top of the corn. 
8. Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes. I didn't cover the dish, but the edges did burn, so next time I'll try covering it, as all we're really doing here is heating everything.

It's hard to serve this dish without it falling apart, but it still tastes delicious! If you have deep individual casserole dishes this might be the time to use them instead.

I like to double the recipe and make 4 single servings and freeze 2 of them. If you freeze them, you don't need to bake them before putting them in the freezer.

Thanks  Emilia for your great recipe!

Shepherd's Pie

4 individual servings of Shepherd's Pie

 Variations 

• Instead of butternut squash, cook and mash cauliflower and then top with some butter and nutmeg.
• Here's another Shepherd's Pie recipe.