Chicken Shepherds pie

I love shepherds pie, and I love chicken, so why not… drum roll please…..Chicken Shepherds Pie!!!!!!! Well, okay. Lets be real with each other. Truth is I had a serious craving for some good’ol homemade shepherds pie, but I had no minced meat. So I got creative. Neccesity is the mother of invention they say.In any case, there is no limit or restriction to how you prepare your meals.
That is In fact the beauty of cookery. The amount of ingredients at our disposal is so vast. And how you utilize them is completely up to you and your gastro-intestinal tract.
It is because of this beauty that I was able to adjust the traditional shepherds pie to suit my current state of affairs. I stuck to a simple low-fat style of cooking which actually turned out to be very rewarding in terms of taste and obviously health.

Ingredients
For the potato mash, you’ll need:

Potatoes 🙂
Butter
Milk
Mushroom soup (or any flavour of your choice)
Onion, chopped
Garlic
Basil leaves
Green pepper

For the chicken, you will need:

Chicken breast, cut in tiny cubes
Carrots, cut in short slender strips
Green pepper strips
Red onion, cut in half rings
Garlic, crushed then chopped
Salt to taste
Some vegetable oil
Worcestershire sauce

Method
I’m not really the quantity surveying kind of cook, so I estimate the proportions according to the number of people partaking of the meal.
I used two potatoes per person for four people and there was alot left over for the following day.
I boiled the potatoes till they got really soft. To test for softness, poke a potato with a fork. If the potato breaks, then they are cooked.
The next thing to do is to make a mixture for the potato mash. I did this by mixing two tablespoons of mushroom soup with a cup of milk. Whether you use full-cream or low-fat milk is totally up to your preference. I prefer to use full-cream milk because it gives the mash a tastier and fuller character.
I then poured this mixture in a blender, along with two cloves of garlic, one green pepper, half an onion, and a few basil leaves. I blended the ingredients together to form a rich, frothy soup-like mixture.
Next I melted the butter and poured it into the blended mixture. I gave the mixture a final blend and put it aside.

I then got my potatoes off the heat, strained them and mashed them up. I poured in the mixture and mashed till everything was well blended, ensuring I got all the lumps flattened out.

Next was the chicken. I fried the chicken in the same pan I used to melt the butter. I did this in order to utilize the butter that remained on the pan. I added an extra tablespoon of vegetable oil, just so it didn’t turn out too dry. Once the chicken begun to brown slightly, I threw in the carrots, onions, green pepper and garlic. I stirred these together, and added a tablespoon of worcestershire (good thing I don’t have to pronounce it) sauce.

Once the chicken was done, I begun to assemble the pie in a shallow rectangular pyrex. The chicken goes first, filling up the base, then the potato mash.
Once assembled, I put the pie in the oven at 200 degrees celcius for about fifteen minutes.