Shepherd's pie is one of my family's favorite dinner recipes. It's hard to go wrong with creamy mashed potatoes, ground beef, veggies, and cheese, after all. Another dinner dish that's met with plenty of fanfare in my house is pot pie, leading me to a grand epiphany to combine both ideas into one hearty casserole.
There's really only one thing that makes shepherd's pot pie any different from regular shepherd's pie and that's biscuits. All I had to do was roll out some refrigerated biscuit dough and layer it beneath and on top of a standard shepherd's pie mixture.
As for ingredients, I bonused up on biscuits with a two-for-$5 sale and spent $2.88 on cheese, $2.29 for potatoes, and $1.99 for frozen mixed vegetables. While I buy my beef from local farmers, for the purpose of this article, I priced out ground beef at my preferred grocery store where it was $3 per pound (I used two pounds). In total, this casserole costs $18.16 to make and fed my entire family of six with no sides required. While I didn't include pricing for staples like the milk and butter used to make mashed potatoes or any seasonings, this dinner remains on the affordable side.
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Once I cooked the meat, made the mashed potatoes, rolled the biscuits out, and gathered the vegetables and cheese, I built the casserole and popped it in the oven. At first, I had a little trouble with the biscuits cooking evenly, so I moved the dish from the oven's top rack to the middle rack to finish cooking and all was right with the world again.
The final result of the shepherd's pot pie was exactly what I imagined it would be. I tasted every ingredient of the traditional shepherd's pie along with some buttery, flaky, warm biscuits. Plus there were plenty of leftovers to reheat for lunch the next day, which is always a win in my book.
Photo credit: Rachel Schneider / CheapismShepherd's Pot Pie
Ingredients:
- 2 pounds of ground beef
- 8 medium russet potatoes, peeled and quartered
- 3/4 cup milk (add more if you want your potatoes creamier)
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 teaspoons black pepper
- 2 cans refrigerated biscuits
- 1 bag frozen mixed vegetables
- 1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
Directions:
- Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.
- Add ground beef into a frying pan with your desired seasonings and brown.
- Boil a pot of water and add the potatoes. Cook until tender, about 15-20 minutes.
- Once the potatoes are tender, mash them, then stir in butter and milk until creamy.
- Use a rolling pin to roll biscuit dough flat enough to cover the bottom and top of a 9x13 baking dish.
- Spray the bottom of the baking dish with cooking spray and layer with biscuit dough. Next, add the ground beef and top with the vegetables. Layer on the mashed potatoes and sprinkle the shredded cheese over the potatoes. Top with another layer of biscuit dough.
- Place the casserole in the oven's middle rack and bake for 40 minutes
- Once baked, let it rest for five minutes, then scoop and serve!
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