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