Non Thunderdome Recipe time!

I decided to post this recipe outside of the normal Thunderdome situation. Mostly because it's Wednesday night, all the good tv shows are on hiatus and I'm bored.

SO!

Most people, me included, think of Shepards pie with this thought in their head: Icky.

When I was a kid,  oftentimes we would have shepards pie. Which to my mother, God bless her soul, was hamburger meat, canned green beans, canned corn, and instant mashed potatoes.

It was foul. Just disgusting. Thinking about it now makes me a little queasy, because we had that often. I won't say my mother made it intentionally gross, she was just limited by resources. One of those resources being the ability to imagine food that tasted good. She just wasn't a cook. And it wasn't until I was 19 that I discovered potato soup isn't just water and potatoes and maybe some milk.
Back to Shepard's pie...

So I was wondering around a farmers market (This one to be exact) and found a root vegetable medley option. Usually that would make me leave immediately, as I have a fear of beets due to an over-beeting in a monthly produce delivery my roommate and I did in Portland.
Anything beets I avoid. Unless they're on fire.

But this was different. It had small tiny baby carrots, parsnips, whole garlic, giant turnips and yes...beets.

I picked it up and started thinking about what I could make with all these things. In the end I kept coming back to root veggie combo with some potatoes. Which is basically shepards pie.

So I thought...what the hell! I'll make shepards pie the way it's supposed to be made! And probably still hate it! This last thought was probably due to the beets.

Here is the original recipe. Which I shouldn't bother to post as I never follow it.

To start off with, I decided to add the parsnips to the potatoes and make a mashed parsnip potato thing. This was stupid, but we'll get to that later.

First we shave the parsnips naked.

Bow chicka bow wow

See the carrot bag? Aren't those the most adorable carrots ever?
These are the parsnips shaved, with some baby carrots just because they're adorable.

They look like little sperm! Wow am I not hungry now.

I diced the parsnips, diced some potatoes and threw them all in a pot.

Note to self: Parsnips float. Never know when vegetable floatability knowledge will come in handy.

Once those are boiling away, I started on the carrots. For all those carrots I probably got half a cup of diced carrot. You know how hard it is to peel and dice 45 individual carrots smaller than a pinky? I do. I spent 30 minutes bitching out the carrots.  But they didn't care. Stupid adorable baby sperm carrots.

Then I approached the turnip. I ...have never eaten a turnip before. At least willingly. I've never chopped one, and outside of the little small red ones for salads I really didn't know what a turnip looked like. But here it is. In all it's turnip glory.

Most underwhelming root vegetable ever.

I threw an onion (I cried), the turnips and the carrots into a fry pan with some butter. After five minutes sauteeing it smelled like heaven in my kitchen. Oh glorious butter.

I then noticed all of my vegetables were rather...white. And beigey. So I thought I'd add some green beans. But not canned green beans. I will never eat those again (see: above).
So I chopped some frozen green beans and threw them in the pot.

Chopping frozen things is much harder than it appears. These were especially wiley.

Once everything started to simmer, I threw in the meat and the worchestershire sauce, and the broth like the recipe called for.

At this point the potatoes and parsnips seemed done, so I drained them and added some butter and fat free half and half to make whipped potatoes.
Lessons learned:
You are the Parsnips bitch. Don't forget that.
Even though parsnips are fork pokey soft in the water, they will not mash. At all.
Hard clumps of goo does not help the mixing process when using a hand blender.
Mashed potato/parsnip goo can fly disproportionate distances when prompted.

So this is what I'm left with:

The parsnips are laughing at you. Or me. Whoever. They're just laughing.

Once the meat cooked down I loaded it into the pie pan.

Underwhelming yet again.

Then I added the non-whipped mixture in what I vainly tried to make into something resembling mashed potatoes.

This looks gross.

I baked it for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, and just pulled it out as I'm writing this post.
It looks exactly like the picture before being baked.

I have a feeling this is going to taste like Dinty Stew with Gloop. Yay.

So to celebrate I made myself a drink.

Highly recommend coconut tequila. The Girly Tequila!

I figure after 3 of these, I won't really care if I'm eating Dinty Stew with Gloop.

Maybe.

I'll let you know.