Cottage Pie Recipe - Disabled Eats

This is part of my Disabled Eats series where I share what I do to make meals more accessible for myself, as someone who is blind and deals with severe chronic pain. Not all of these changes are revolutionary, nor will they work for everyone. I’m just sharing what I do and I hope that it helps, or at the very least enlightens, others.

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Crispy and golden sliced potatoes top meat and vegetables in a pink ceramic pie dish

The difference between a cottage pie and a shepherd’s pie is the filling. Cottage pie’s use beef and shepherd pies have lamb. Both recipes are simple, but for a disabled person they can be time consuming. Here’s how I make things easier on myself.

(Jump right to the recipe)

Here are two things to make your cottage/shepherd’s pie more accessible:

Typically, both pies are topped with mashed potatoes. That’s a lot of steps, plus it’s additional cleanup. Instead, I thinly slice the potatoes and place them on top of the other ingredients.

If you want to be fancy, place the potatoes in a cool swirl pattern. I was feeling too sick on this day, so I just threw them in there. I did make sure that everything was evenly covered and none of the potatoes were layered too thickly on one another.

There are three options for simplifying the vegetable ingredients:

1. Buy frozen

2. Buy pre-cut

3. Use a chopper

I use a veggie chopper that I got off of Amazon. You can find them anywhere, though.

That’s it for adjustments. I love recipes like this. They’re so simple to make, plus, you can adjust the ingredients based on what you have available in you pantry.

Speaking of ingredients, here’s the recipe. I measure this recipe by heart, so my apologies for there not being any exact measurements for some things.

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Ingredients:

• 1 pound ground beef

• 1 large potato or 2 smaller sized ones

• Carrots

• 1 bag of frozen peas

• Onions

• Celery

• 2 tablespoons of tomato paste

• 1 cup of stock or broth
  I used beef this time, but use whatever you prefer. I didn’t do it this time, but sometimes I will do 1/2 cup of broth and 1/2 cup of red wine or beer

• Garlic

• Herbs: I used fresh rosemary from my own herb garden and then a store bought Herbes de Provence mixture

• Nutmeg

• Cheddar cheese (yes, goat cheese would have been more elevated, but I was working with what I had available)

• Salt and pepper

• BUTTER

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Cooking steps

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Stove Top

• Thinly slice your potatoes. If they’re too thick, they won’t crisp up properly. Set those aside, we won’t be using them for a bit.

• Dice your vegetables. Do this however it makes sense for you - by hand, with a chopper, from a bag, whatever is accessible for you.

• Add some olive oil to a large pan and then add your carrots, onions, and celery. Top with some salt & pepper
  Cook for about 5 minutes, until soft.

Sliced potatoes piled on top of cottage pie ingredients. Everything is inside a pink ceramic pie dish.

• Add peas, tomato paste, and garlic. Stir until the garlic is fragrant.

• Add your meat, herbs and spices, plus another round of salt and pepper. Cook for 5 minutes

• Add your broth (or liquid of choice) and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and let thicken.

• *Here’s where you need to use your best judgment. If the sauce is too thick, add some flour to thicken it up. The caveat is that you have to remember that this is going into the oven. You need some moisture in the mix. Otherwise it will be too dry once it bakes. If you think there’s not enough liquid, add some more broth. Again, my apologies because I cook a lot by intuition (aka been cooking my whole life), so I just kind of know.

Oven

An image of the crispy potatoes and the rest of the pie cooking in the oven

• I coated my pie pan with a thin layer of butter and then added the meat and vegetable mixture.

• You can omit this step, but I’m a cheese hag, so I did a hefty layer of extra sharp shredded cheddar on top of the meat and veg mix.

• Top that with your sliced potatoes. Like I said earlier, I usually do a very aesthetic layer of potatoes, but haphazard is fine. They’re potatoes. You can’t mess them up.

• I poured 1/2 a stick of melted butter in an even layer on top of the potatoes. Then I topped with salt and pepper.

Bake for 40 minutes.

When the 40 minutes was up for this particular one, there was some grease that rose to the top. I used a paper towel to get that off. Then I popped it back in for 8 minutes.

Let it cool before you dive in.