Recipe for Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie
This comforting casserole would be the perfect thing to serve for dinner before going out trick-or-treating, and you know your kids would be full of protein, healthy carbs, and a lot of vegetables!
- Prep Time: 30 minutes
- Cook Time: 20 minutes
- Total Time: 50 minutes
- Yield: 6
- Category: main dish
Ingredients
Scale
- 1.5 lbs . ground beef (or chopped lean beef steak ( I used steak))
- 2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)
- 1 small shallot (finely chopped)
- 1 tbsp . or so olive oil
- 1 oz can tomato sauce (8 .)
- 2 Tbsp . ketchup
- 2 Tbsp . worchestershire sauce
- cup about 1/2 frozen chopped spinach (or more if you like)
- cup about 1 frozen peas
- 1 medium - large sweet potato/yam
- enough leftover mashed potatoes to spread on top -( I used 3 medium potatoes to get the amount shown (and it was kind of a lot))
- cheese to sprinkle on top
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Brown the beef along with the garlic and shallot in the olive oil. Add in the tomato sauce, ketchup, worchestershire, and spinach. Bring to a simmer, cover, and let it cook while you prepare the sweet potato.
- Slice the sweet potato into THIN slices. It's easier to eat if the sweet potatoes are sliced really thin!
- Next, microwave the slices for a minute or two until they are just a little softened.
- Now that they're softened a little, you can use a pumpkin cookie cutter to cut the sweet potatoes into pumpkins.
- Remember to save your scraps! You will be chopping them up and putting them in the meat mixture. Sometimes I have people ask me what I do with all my scraps from cutting out cheese and veggies into cute shapes for bento lunches - putting them in casseroles is one of my tricks 😉
- Now get out some tiny little cutters to make the jack-o-lantern faces. This recipe serves 6, so make that many jack-o-lanterns so everyone can have one 🙂
- Toss the sweet potato scraps and the frozen peas into the skillet with the meat mixture and simmer until heated through. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- Spray a casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray. Spoon in the meat mixture. Top with mashed potatoes. Sprinkle with the amount of cheese you desire and salt and pepper to taste. Lay the jack-o-lanterns on top. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, or until the cheese melts. Remove the foil for about 5 minutes more to allow browning.