Meal of the week!

Broccoli salad, Challah, and Chicken Shepherd's Pie

 No secrets! I am going to share my brand new recipe with you!

Left is a snap shot of this past week's Erev Shabbat meal and might I say, in all modesty, that it turned out delicious!!

I started out knowing I was going to do something with mashed potatoes and chicken and this is what happened!

Dice for quicker cooking

Prepare your potatoes however you like them. I peeled mine because our potatoes had some scab this year so the skin isn't so nice. But if you have nice smooth skinned potatoes there is no reason you need to peel them.

Do as many as would suit you. I did around 10 cups (cubed) and the finished casserole would have easily fed our family of 4 plus 6 guests(no leftovers), so a cup per person might be a good guide if you are not sure.

When mashing I added 1/2 butter, 2 tbsp of cream cheese and salted them to taste. 

* if you desire to make this recipe without the dairy then you could try using almond or rice milk to make your potatoes extra creamy

Use only light olive oil when frying

  Drizzle some light olive oil in a shallow pan and saute as much or as little onion as you wish. I like a lot of onion so I sliced a whole Spanish onion. Along with that I added:

2 sliced portobello mushrooms

1 red bell pepper, sliced

2 cups of chicken (or two breasts worth, that had been previously cooked and sliced)

1 frozen pesto cube (you could sub. fresh basil or get pesto sauce in the store)

1 tsp of sweet smoked paprika

salt and pepper

and about a 1/4 cup of water just to keep the moisture content up.

stir well when adding milk and flour

 Once it's just nicely sauteed, turn down the heat and add a drizzle of milk and a bit of flour to thicken everything up and give it a nice sauce. *Once again if you desire to keep the dairy out of it, use almond or rice milk. You should end up with something that looks like the picture to the right ->

grease well - it makes cleaning up a breeze!

Grease your pan well, scrape the chicken mixture into it and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese...sorry no substitute I can think of for that! Cover with half of the potato mixture, sprinkle with cheddar cheese if desired and finish spreading potatoes. Sprinkle top with pepper and dot with butter. This can be done ahead and kept in the fridge until shortly before the meal. Heat at 350 in the oven until heated through.

It proved a winner for a Erev Shabbat meal because I was able to make it ahead, put it in the fridge and have everything cleaned up long before supper time. We also had lots left over for a meal during Shabbat as well!

Shavua Tov!

You'll Need
potatoes
chicken
1 red pepper
1 large onion
portobello mushrooms
pesto or fresh basil
sweet smoked paprika
salt and pepper
cheese (optional)