Delicious Cottage Pie with hash Browns

We Brits don't do everything perfect, but one thing we can do are delicious comfort food meals. Toad in the hole, Roast beef with Yorkshire puddings, but today, I've gone with a delicious cottage pie.

There is nothing innovative about this recipe, at all, it's probably the way most of the country makes it. But that doesn't make it any less special. A fact (well I'm not sure about fact but theory) is that shepherd's pie obviously uses lamb because shepherds look after sheep, but cottage pie doesn't refer to the meat, which is usually beef, but the potatoes on the top which are sliced, boiled potatoes which makes it look like the roof of an old cottage. I can't be bothered to peel and slice a load of potatoes, so I used layered, frozen hash browns. 

You will notice that I have been very lax about the measurements in this recipe, and that's on purpose- cooking should be relaxed itself, you can compromise many ingredients, you could use ketchup or another sauce, different herbs, you don't have to use chopped tomatoes, you could keep it as just a gravy sauce, and you should never follow a recipe's seasoning and not adjust to taste (they don't know how salty you want it!); the exercise of cooking shouldn't be simply following a recipe to the letter, it should be about experimenting and learning the way you want to do things. Who am I to tell you to buy carrots if you don't have any in the house? You can really use whatever veg or flavours you want in this. The point at which this casual method becomes hard is in baking, where you have to be accurate, and if the sauce becomes too wet. If you add too much water or stock, and it becomes too runny, just simmer it with the lid off for longer, so it can reduce and get thicker. Another thickener can be cooking the mince with a few tablespoons of flour, but I personally don't like doing this much.

1)Chop up two large onions, peel and chop a few carrots and chop a few celery sticks and saute it all in a tbsp or so of oil with plenty of garlic. Let it really sweat down for about 10-20 minutes until everything is really really soft. After about 5 minutes, add some chopped chestnut mushrooms, just because I had them in the house. 

2)Whilst you cook the veg, brown a pack of beef mince, until fully cooked. You could also add some bacon lardons here, but my greatest tip of all time, one which I got from school cooking lessons, is to buy liver (lamb's is the best), it's dirt cheap, chop it really finely and cook it with the mince. It adds a meaty flavour and extra iron, and makes a small amount of mince go very far. You can do this with a ragu or lasagne or anything with mince. I read to add some anchovies here and let them melt into meat, but I tried that today and I don't think it made a difference. 

3)To your veg, season it well with salt and pepper, add about 2 tbsp tomato puree, Worcestershire sauce, a few tablespoons, dried herbs (I use thyme as it's lovely) a few rich beef stock pots or cubes, 2 cans of chopped tomatoes, swilling out the can with some water, and red wine. I love cooking with alcohol- it adds fantastic depth to a dish, but there are a few rules. You can't just keep white or red wine open to cook with, so what I do is freeze bags of the dregs in people's glasses or the last of the wine in the bottle no-one finishes which freezes like a slushie, but if you don't have that, you can keep a bottle of white vermouth open for white wine (dilute it slightly as it's more potent than wine) or marsala  (use the dry stuff) which doesn't have to be cooked down for as long for red wine. Really cook red wine down for a long time, then it goes into a magical flavour for the sauce. You could even use stout.

4)Simmer your sauce with the mince for a good hour, longer is better, over low heat, then take the lid off and cook it for another 10 minutes to let it reduce.
5)Pour the sauce into a large baking dish, and top with frozen hash browns, some grated cheese and bake at 180 degrees for about half an hour, you're really looking to get the hash browns fully cooked and piping hot. Serve right away, or leave it uncooked for the next day, it tastes a lot better.