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Hob and oven recipe
In a cottage pie you can use up food left over from the previous day – cooked vegetables, or the minced remains of a roast joint of meat. If you make this cottage pie properly, no one will be able to say that he can taste the plaster and wallpaper in it!
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Additional cooking time: 25 minutes
Servings: 4
Ingredients
3 medium potatoes
salt
2 carrots
¼ cabbage or ¼ marrow
2 tsp oil
400 gm minced beef
1 onion
1 beef stock cube
250 ml boiling water
1 tbl plain flour, preferably wholemeal
1 tbl tomato puree or tomato ketchup
1 tbl Worcester sauce
salt and pepper
1 tbl or 15 gm butter
Instructions
- Peel the potatoes if necessary and cut them into chunks. Cover them with cold water in a saucepan, add salt, bring them to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
- Top, tail and scrape the carrots as necessary, then slice them up. Put them in enough water to cover them in the base of a steamer and bring it to the boil.
- Wash and shred the cabbage; or peel, core and slice the marrow. Add it to the steaming part of the steamer.
- Pre-heat the oven to 180 oC.
- Brown the meat in the oil in a large frying pan for a few minutes, then turn it over and brown the other side for a few more minutes.
- Meanwhile top, tail, skin and slice the onion.
- Crumble the stock cube and dissolve it in the 250 ml of boiling water in a very large saucepan.
- Transfer the meat to the large saucepan, leaving the oil in the pan. Bring it back to the boil and leave it to simmer.
- Fry the onion slices gently for two or three minutes, turn them over and fry them for a further two or three minutes.
- Meanwhile stir the flour, tomato puree or ketchup, Worcester sauce and seasonings into the meat.
- When the onions are cooked add them to the saucepan.
- When the potatoes have cooked for 20 minutes, mash them with the butter in a saucepan. Don’t compact the mash.
- Drain the carrots and the cabbage or marrow and stir them into the meat saucepan. Then pour the contents into a large (2 pint or 1200 ml) pie dish.
- Spread the crumbled potato over the top and bake for 25 minutes on a baking tray until the potato is golden brown.
Tips
- To make the top look even tastier sprinkle some grated cheese onto the potato.
- Alternatively mix the cooked cabbage with the mashed potato before spreading it over the rest of the ingredients.
- Serve with peas.