Mini Turkey Shepherd's Pies

Mini Turkey Shepherd's Pie

I've played around with shepherd's pie flavor in the past.  This time I wanted to play around with the layers.  My natural inclination is to mix everything together.  This time around I wanted to separate each ingredient and flavor and let them mix together in a perfect bite.

I started out by planning the dish on a post-it note.  I drew a semblance of a pie dish with layers, numbered those, and then started filling in the legend.  I ended up with 4 layers:  caramelized onions, browned and seasoned meat, peas and carrots, and creamy mashed potatoes.

While on a shopping trip to pick up all the necessary ingredients, I came across some portabella mushroom caps and immediately knew that I would want to insert them as a layer between the onions and the meat.  I cheated a bit by picking up frozen peas and carrots to make my prep a bit easier.

For simplicity's sake, I only seasoned the meat with Worcestershire sauce and the mashed potatoes with salt.  I wanted the flavors of everything else to speak for themselves, and speak they did!  The sweetness of the caramelized onions mixed perfectly with the earthiness of the portabella mushrooms.

I think the layering effect came out really nice.  I got to play with one of our new goodies, oven safe soup bowls.  They made a perfect serving size.  The Guinea Pig got to play with another one of our new goodies:  a food mill.  He did a great job ricing the potatoes.  Perhaps some of the best textured, though labor intensive, mashed potatoes we've ever made.