Root vegetable pie with a skin-on mash topping

Autumn cooking can be so great, as I noticed again tonight. How have I missed the hearty potato mash topped pies! It's not really cold enough yet for proper winter dishes, but since it's late September, I find that a few pies can be made. So I found that a root vegetable pie was in order for a Monday dinner.

I want to share this recipe with this month's Vegetable Palette vegetarian cooking challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table, which is very much the inspiration for this recipe anyway. Vegetable Palette's theme for September is “purple and blues” and this very much caught my imagination. During the whole month I was considering so many options for purple or blue recipes by using different vegetables and it was getting difficult to decide. I just didn't necessarily want to resort to blueberries, which I would've done, if no other good idea would've come along. Luckily I found these purple carrots and purple garlic, which somehow wanted to go into hearty pie, and I paired them with some golden beetroots and also fairly purple red onion. It's probably my twisted sense of humour that instead of the naturally purple beetroot, I used its golden cousin. Well, it did work well together. This recipe is also very easy to veganise, I just preferred using butter and cheese in the mash. 

Here is the recipe for my purple root vegetable pie:

For the filling:

100 g purple carrots

4 golden beetroots

1/3 cup puy lentils

1 large red onion

3 purple garlic cloves

Olive oil

A dash of dry cider (I used organic Black Fox cider)

1-2 tbsp vegetable stock powder

Sage

Thyme

Salt

Ground black pepper

For the topping:

500 g potatoes

2 tbsp butter or margarine

1 tsp salt

50 g grated Emmental (optional)

Method:

Cook the potatoes in salt water until they are done. Drain most of the water off, but leave a little bit of it in the pan, add the butter, salt and cheese and mash. Set to side.

Peel the root vegetables and cut them into cubes. Chop the red onion fairly coarsely and the garlic finely and start cooking these in olive oil. After a few minutes, add the root vegetables. After again a few minutes, add a dash of cider and vegetable stock powder and let simmer. Add a little bit water, if needed. 

In the meanwhile cook the lentils in water in a separate pot.

Once the vegetables are almost done, add the lentils and seasoning. Let simmer for a while until the flavours have blended nicely, season to taste.

Put the root vegetable and lentil mix onto the bottom of an oven dish and spread the mash on it as cover. Make any patterns on the top, as you desire and bake in the oven at 200C for about 25 minutes until the mash is baked golden brown.

Enjoy the pie warm on a cosy autumn night. I'm also looking forward to having it tomorrow as lunch.

Your VegHog

Skin-on mash with veggie Schnitzel and mushroom sauce

This type of dish is one my absolute weekend favourites: potatoes, veggies and a vegetarian Schnitzel of some description and I quite often tend to have such meals. The components can and will vary, but the principle stays the same. So here's just one of those dishes. I would urge you to try skin-on mash, there's not a really a reason to remove the nutritious skins and they add a bit more interesting texture to the mash.

Skin-on mash

500 g potatoes

25 g butter

50 ml milk

1 tsp salt

Boil the potatoes in salt water until done. Mash them with the peels and add the butter, milk and salt.

Mushroom sauce

200 g closed cup mushrooms

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

Olive oil

100 ml oat cream

Salt

Pepper

Fresh basil

Slice the mushrooms ans chop the onion and garlic finely. Cook them in olive oil until soft and until the mushrooms have lost some of the excess water. Add the cream, salt, pepper and basil and let simmer until the cream has been infused nicely by the mushrooms and other components.

 

Leek side

1 leek

1 onion

25 g butter

50 g dry cider

Salt

Pepper

Slice the leek thinly and chop the onion finely. Cook them in butter until soft, add the cider, salt and pepper and let simmer.

Schnitzel

2 ready made vegetarian Schnitzel

Heat the Schnitzel in the oven until the surfaces are crispy.

Serve everything together and enjoy!

Your VegHog