Meatless Shepherd's Pie

That's right. Meatless Shepherd's Pie. And it's damn good, too. I'm by no means a vegetarian and really desire and almost require some dead animal served to me on a daily basis, but Amy has been trying to break me of this. I resisted at first, but over the past seven months since returning from deployment, my dear wife has convinced me to tolerate meals containing little to no meat or meat substitutes.
Audrey is another story...and yes that IS a Misfits shirt she's wearing.

So how does one make shepherd's pie without beef or sausage? Use great northern beans. You get all the protein of ground beef without the fat, plus with all the other veggies and 'taters, you barely notice. Quick tip on cooking beans: if you run them under water in a strainer until they stop foaming, you won't get as gassy.

We started by preheating the oven to 400, then cutting up three or four medium potatoes and boiling them in a pot. Then we dumped bags of frozen peas, corn, broccoli, and green beans into our awesomely retro casserole dish. For future attempts, I think we'll defrost them as it ended up being a bit watery and also still a bit cold, especially the broccoli. We then added sliced carrots. Once the potatoes were soft, we drained and mashed them, adding butter, milk and cream cheese until it was a nice thick consistency. We dumped a can of great northern beans onto the veggies, mixed it up and then layered the mashed taters on top. After about 30 minutes in the oven, it was ready to serve.

I had a delicious Samuel Adam's Coastal Wheat beer with this. It's like Blue Moon, but with a lemony taste rather than orange.

As usual with our culinary experiments, Amelie and Cassie loved it, and Audrey was not even willing to try it. Not even after asking her to just try the mashed potatoes. Oh well, her loss. There was just enough left for me to have some for lunch tomorrow and get a food coma before going to school at Damneck.