Shepherd's Pie: or "I made gravy from scratch and it turned out okay!"

I made a triple batch of this recipe of shepherd's pie. The intent was to make a couple 13 x 9 pans instead of the square pan that one batch makes. One for dinner tonight and the next few days of lunches, and one to freeze for the weekly potluck.

Some caveats: I used ground lowfat chicken and those soy burger crumbles. For a recipe like this, that works just fine and is WAY lower in fat. I also used a combo of neufachel and fat-free cream cheese for the potatoes (fat-free cream cheese, on its own, is eeeeeeeeew! in my opinion). I think you will need more than three batches of potatoes to cover two 13 x 9 pans in a manner befitting shepherd's pie, so be forewarned.

Maybe this would take ten minutes to prepare, as advertised, if you already had all the components made. However, I don't think that's a good estimate of time...it took me considerably longer than that. But that's okay, I won't have to cook the next potluck day.

The other reason it took me longer was that I made beef gravy from scratch for this recipe. Yeah, me. I can't believe it myself. I went to the bible of cooking, "The Joy of Cooking" for inspiration. I didn't use any beef drippings because a.) I didn't have any, and b.) that's more fat added to the recipe that I definitely don't need.

For the gravy, I used a combination of light margarine (yeah, I know it isn't meant for this stuff) and olive oil that I melted in a sauce pan. Then I threw some all-purpose flour on it...recipes seem to vary about how much you need. For a cup of flour, they say two tablespoons of butter and one to two tablespoons of AP flour, but I was far from exact. Whisk that butter and flour together and cook it a brief period of time. After that, I dumped in some beef stock, and some leftover rose wine. Oh, and some pepper and thyme (there's enough salt in it already, probably). Cooked it down, and still had lumps. Instead of freaking out about the lumps, I got out the trusty stick blender and while you'll have to watch out carefully using a relatively thin liquid like this with a stick blender just to make sure you don't splash it everywhere, it gets rid of all the lumps like a charm. Hey, maybe everyone else knows how to do this already, but I didn't.

The upshot is, I am no longer afraid to make gravy that will taste good! I don't usually make it, but maybe I'll do it more often now.

The potatoes for this recipe would be nice just by themselves, with the cream cheese, garlic, and cheddar cheese. I used 2% cheese throughout, may as well save a few calories and fat grams.

This was WAY yummy even with the fat reducing changes.