This isn’t so much a recipe as a narration. I accumulated food, and then I ate it.
So there was someone at the farmers’ market selling an assortment of intriguing root vegetables in early summer – woo! So I ended up with a parsnip, 2 rutabagas, and 1 celeriac. I also had some carrots hanging around. And then one of my co-workers came in with a bag of turnips from her CSA farm share that she didn’t want, and I yoinked it because they looked arrow-shaped and somehow much more appealing than your standard turnip at the store.
And then the root vegetable sat for almost a week because it was summer, and not really root vegetable time. I saw a post on roasted root vegetable pizza over at Straight From the Farm, but I do not posses pizza-making mojo, so instead of making it I forwarded the link to a friend who does bake well (and owns a pizza stone) to see if we wanted to make a project of that some time. That was not, however, scheduled in the near enough future to provide the fate of these tubers.
So I did the easiest thing possible – I cut them into chunks, piled them into foil packets (with some garlic cloves), and roasted them. One packet was seasoned with Penzey’s Turkish seasoning and the other one was Penzey’s fajita seasoning with some extra crappy paprika that I got from my supermarket when I ran out and think has red dye in it (and yes, I’ve bought better since, but I’m having trouble convincing myself to throw anything away unused). And I baked it on 350, but I didn’t really pay attention to how long – I think roughly the length of time it took to clean my kitchen and play a round or two or three of bubble spinner.
End result – the packet with the Turkish seasoning was delicious, and the packet with the fajita seasoning was just okay and kind of unimpressive. But I am really loving the Turkish seasoning – it was a freebie in with another order, but when I run out I’d buy more. But I had a lot of food in the house, so the tubers did not end up a meal on their own.
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I also had leftover rice hanging out in my refrigerator. Rice is the one thing I have found, where your results are much better if you are cooking on an electric range.
So for this one – have one burner on high and one burner almost as low as it will go.
Add to your pot with a lid: 1 part rice (in this case, 1/2 cup), 2 parts liquid (in this case, the tail end of jar of salsa and enough water to fill up the rest of the 1 cup measurement), 1 teaspoon lipid (forgotten in this case), a pinch of salt, and anything extra (in this case, the pinched and powdered head of 1 clove, 1 teaspoon turmeric, and 3 dried tomatoes sliced into thin strips).
Put pot onto high burner, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, stir once, cover, and transfer to the low burner. Wait 20 minutes – and then you have perfect rice.
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And then I had a cheap roast of beef. I cut it into thirds and only prepped part of it to be a real roast (embedded garlic cloves and rosemary and then froze it), but this part was sliced into thin strips against the grain (because otherwise this cheap meat will be tough and stringy).
I tossed the meat with a third of a taco seasoning packet my mother had bought in bulk from Amazon. And then I cooked it down quickly with some sliced onions and minced garlic and jalapeno (flesh only).
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Cottage Pie
So then I pulled out my pie plate (the right size for how much food I had, if there had been more, I would have used a casserole dish – your call).
On the bottom, I lay out some thin slices of a very ripe tomato.
Over that, I layered a mixture of the beef and onions I’d cooked and the leftover rice with sundried tomatoes. I sprinkled over that the rest of the tomato, diced.
Then I heated up the roasted root vegetables and mashed them with some cream cheese and salt – and then spread that over top of the meat.
Baked at 350F until the top was getting nice and crusty.
And the end result was deliciousness and many leftovers turned into actual food and lunches.