Sheppers pie with colcannon

Hi,
while I am not Irish in any way, I do like to eat cottage pie and colcannon. That’s why I combined them this time into cottage pie with colcannon. I am not the first one to combine the two, but here is how I make my cottage pie and colcannon. This is how we celebrated the first day of spring.

Needed things for cottage pie with colcannon

1/2 kg Ground beef
a carrot
1/2 cup peas
1 Tbsp tomato paste
onion
2 spring onions
1/2 small cabbage (I used the pointy one)
3 Tbsp thinly sliced Brussel sprouts
3 Tbsp of spinach (I used frozen pods that had cream in them)
1/2 kg potatoes (use the starchy ones, I used waxy ones and the texture was a bit off)
butter
milk
salt, pepper

I always start with first sweating my onions and carrots. Then I add meat and cook it until it is nice and browned. Next is tomato paste, and I just fry it a bit in the pan, to remove the acidity. After that, I season it with a bit of salt and pepper and add 1 cup of water. Then deglaze the pan and simmer it until happy with the sauce.

Make colcannon

boil the potatoes until soft then mash them with butter and adjust the seasoning. Soften spring onions in a pan with butter, then add the cabbage and sweat it off until tender. Add the cabbage and spring onion mixture to the mashed potatoes and mix them in. Taste it and adjust accordingly, but make sure not to make them too salty. Since we will bake the pie in the oven, the colcannon will lose a bit of moisture and be a bit more salty when pie is finished.

Combine the meat and colcannon into cottage pie with colcannon

To a buttered pan add the meat mixture and level it. Spoon the colcannon on top of the meat in an even layer. Then if you want you can smooth it out, or use the spoon to make waves on the surface. Add little pieces of butter on the top and bake until golden. When the pie is done take it out of the oven and let it cool down for approx 20 min, or as long as you can. Serve it with a simple green salad. Enjoy!

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