shepherd's pie

Awhile ago, I decided that a crumpled heap of papers in an old seaweed tin was not the ideal organization system for my recipes, and I put them into a binder. Since then, I have been thinking about the shepherd's pie recipe that I saw. I went grocery shopping, but I ended up at Ranch 99, which is not generally a place that sells ground lamb, so after some mild harassment from the meat counter dudes, I was on my way with ground beef.

Once I was back at the apartment, I discovered that I had two recipes. One was a gourmet version and the other was more of a college student version. Since I didn't have pearl onions, tomato paste, turnips or dry white wine on hand, I decided to go for the college student version. Naturally, I then discovered that I didn't have any button mushrooms, aka ingredient number two.

This past weekend, I had picked up some buna-shimeji mushrooms at Mitsuwa. I don't think I've ever had them before and I had been seeing them both there and at Ranch 99, so I got some. I didn't think that shepherd's pie was really the traditional dish in which buna-shimeji are used, but I think the Cheesecake Factory shepherd's pie has shiitake, so in they went.

First, I had to do some quick research on buna-shimeji, which yielded some interesting results:

- health benefits for mice eating buna-shimeji/beech mushrooms. I'm not a mouse, but maybe the mushrooms can counteract whatever artery hardening I'm going to get from eating all that ground beef.

- a big discussion on takikomi-gohan, or kinoko-gohan, in which buna-shimeji mushrooms can play a starring role

- images of happy mushrooms

Basically, I ended up following neither of the recipes that closely. I threw in some frozen carrots and peas, ground beef, onions, garlic, leeks, thyme, black pepper, red wine, and a beef bouillon cube. It was not bad.


Shepherd's pie is not that photogenic.