Sweet Potato Cottage Pie

Cottage Pie with Roasted Sweet Potato Topping

While technically it is still summer, my heart says it’s fall and my stomach is craving all the comfort style foods! Fall is my favorite season for many reasons, fall is cozy and comfortable, the colors and moody weather make my heart scream creativity. As we are approaching our move date, my fridge is still full of produce, well because I have a problem and going to the farmers market this time of year is an actual “thing” because it brings me joy.

So here I am trying to come up with meals to make to use up all this food. Which happens to be my most favorite way to cook!

So this gets me to making Cottage Pie (Which is a Shepard’s pie made with beef instead of lamb) with Roasted Sweet Potato Topping.

Filling

1 lb Grass fed Ground Beef

¼ lb pasture raised pork sausage (I used a mild Italian)

1 red pepper chopped

1 Jalapeno chopped

Handful chopped green onion

2 carrots chopped

Mushrooms sliced

1 medium zucchini quartered and sliced

Tomato Paste to taste

Seasoning (I used paleo powder salt free Herb seasoning) to taste

Salt & Pepper to taste

Topping

3-4 Small/Medium Yams chopped (I peeled half the potatoes and left the skins on the other half)

Coconut oil

Sea Salt

Butter if wanted

Preheat oven 350 degrees

Topping;

Put chopped yams on parchment paper, scoop out a few spoonful of coconut oil and sprinkle with sea salt. Once the coconut oil melted in the oven I mixed together and cooked until soft.

Filling;

Sauteed ground beef and sausage in my cast iron Dutch oven until mostly cooked, I then added the chopped red pepper, jalapeno, mushrooms and carrots and cooked until slighted soft. I then added the zucchini sprinkled with salt/pepper and the herb seasoning (I waited to add the zucchini in hopes it wouldn’t get too soft). Cooked down for a few minutes. Next I added the tomato paste, I ended up using up most of the little can, however I would recommend measuring this by your preference. Let flavors blend together for a few minutes. Once everything had cooked down, I did opt to remove some of the fat from the pan so it would hold together more like a pie.

Meanwhile, I finished up the topping! I pulled out the roasted sweet potatoes and put them into a bowl topped with a slice of butter. With my immersion blended I mixed it all together. I left some skin chunks and roasted bits in the potatoes because I really liked the texture, feel free to blend until smooth. Do you.

Spread the potato mixture on top of the meat filling. Nice thing about the dutch oven, is you don’t have to transfer the meat out of the pan! Yay, win!

I choose to cook the cottage pie on my Traeger for a little bit of smoky flavor (Lid OFF!), however if you don’t have a Traeger, use your oven! 325 degrees in oven or Traeger or approx. 15 minutes or until you see some bubbling of the filling.

So good. Expect to go back for seconds.

Served well with a fresh green salad, friends and a good class of Pinot Noir.