editor’s note: This post’s purpose is more for the author’s personal diary of ingredients and ratios for future use. American Cottage Pie recipes are as ubiquitous as pet hairs, nearly everyone has one or nine million. Do we really need another variation?

Yesterday found Biggles wandering aimlessly throughout the local mega mart attempting to come up with something, anything for dinner. We’ve had ground beef for the previous 2 days, why not another? This time topped with mashed potatoes?

Yup, 3rd day in a row for ground beef.  I couldn’t believe it myself, but I just couldn’t come up with a better solution. In the past months I’ve run myself even stupider with chicken thighs and pork steaks. Covering a meat & gravy slurry with mashed taters seemed to be my only salvation.

Holy gravy Batman! I have no idea why this dish came out so light, tasty and perfect in every way, but it did.  And brother or sister? I wanted to make sure I put down the basics here so when the hankering comes up again, I can whip this out. My ability to remember even the largest of details has long since bid a farewell.

Ground Meat – 1 pound
Onion – White and small dice
Garlic – Mooshy and as much or as little as one wants
Thyme – Heaping teaspoon full
Mushrooms – Minimum of 16 oz slice – variatize them
Beef Broff – 1 & 1/3 cuppa
Tomato Paste – Heaping Tablespoon full
Salt & Pepper – To taste ya foo
Flour – 1/4 cuppa
Veggies – I used frozed mixed
Mashed Potatoes – Enough for 6 hungry people, give or take

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F with rack in center position.

Brown everything in large, wide fry pan. You’ll need the surface area to make browning easier.

The few key points I need to remember are to start the mashed potatoes first, get them boiling before you start on the filling.  Then brown the meat, onion, mushrooms together or separately depending on your fussiness level. Then toss in the frozen veggies to warm them. Add the flour and heat for no more than 3 to 4 minutes, just get everything coated.  Add the tomato paste, stir in. Then add the broth, simmer for 15 minutes give or take.  This will set the flour and reduce the liquid just a tad. Set aside until potatoes are tender and ready to be mashed. Use only real butter and milk/cream with as much butter fat as you have on hand or are willing to purchase. We used manufacturing cream with a fat content of maybe 38 to 40%. Install filling to appropriate baking device, smoove taters over the top with love.  Coat with butter or baking spray and install to oven for 30 minutes until golden brown.  Yank, let sit for 10.

Hooboy!  At first bite I couldn’t believe it turned out this good, so delectable! Yes, I impressed myself. I can hardly wait to make this again, with a few additions of course. Not sure what those changes might be though, it’ll come to me.  Probably while meandering through the store attempting yet again to come up with something for dinner.

xo, Biggles

ps – Chilebrown, please do not scroll downwards.  It’s a dessert and it was bucktoothed evil good. A homemade apple cake with Uncle Ralph’s tree ripened Granny Smiths, home made apple syrupy with bits and once again, whipped manufacturing cream.

I was sitting and watching tv an hour ago and had the idea of you’re looking at. Greens, shitake, onions, garlic, carrots, fresh rosemary, thyme, salt-free beef broth, little red taters, set to high all day.
Remember, crock pots take more work than one might think. Just tossing in ingredients and not browning the meat is a logical fallacy (thanks Cookie!). Don’t add much moisture, I just added 1/2 cup of beef broth and it will probably be too much, I can reduce it later. Also, season well, that’s what crock pots like. Now get to smell this sucker cooking on high all day!
xo, Biggles
But wait, there’s more.

Umph. I’m full.
4.5 hours on high, 1.5 hours on low. Meat was 210 to 220 when pulled. Neither the meat, carrots, onions, or mushrooms were fall aparty. You could remove everything with tongs, just like that. Juicy, tender, fell apart in your mouth to ever last part. Even the meat had some tasty bark to it. As expected the sauce was a tad bland, good by any standards but I wanted perfection. So I separated all the bits from the juice and reduced by 1/3. Used it as gravy over the food and taters.
I’m full now.

I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to post this or not, but since the images came out and I did a few things differently this time I thought I would offer it up.
I’ve been wanting to do a whole chicken in the crock-pot since I did the pork, yesterday was the day. I called it Eyeball Chicken because I opened the fridge and looked for, then grabbed stuff. No measuring, used my eyeball for portion control. I did use a lot of the ingredients and portions from my Crock-pot pork shoulder taco heaven – Or, I did it, I did it, I did it !!!
As previously stated, ya can’t just dump stuff in to the pot and walk away, you must do some extra things to bring everything up. Meaning, after cooking for 3 or 4 hours, the chicken was not brown or appealing to say the least. I jacked my oven up to 550, installed the bird to a cookie sheet with a cooling rack, popped it in the oven for 15 minutes, worked like a charm.
Before you prep anything, put your cup of broth or beer in the pot and jack the heat, high or low.
Whole chicken – washed dried and trussed – rub with favorite rub – s&p, granulated onion, dried parsely and ground celery seed, whatever.

liquid – 1 cuppa – add to pot, turn on
carrots – peeled & sliced
celery – peeled a bit and sliced
onion – mine was big so didn’t add it all
mushrooms – sliced a few times – way less than bite size
garlic – as much as you want, smooshed then sliced once
tomatillos – brown in broiler
I realize my choice of ingredients here pretty basic, except maybe for the tomatillos. Am still attempting to get my process down, then I can move on. Ya dork.
Install veggies to warming pot, lay trussed and rubbed chicky over the top. Install lid and walk away until everything is done, mine was on high for nearly 3.5 to 4 hours.
Sigh, looks like your typical crock-pot meal, the chicken was really pale and the broth was thin. What to do?
The chicken needed color, decided not to use the propane torch, figured I’d burn the rub. So, I jacked my oven’s temp to 550, rack in the middle. I needed it hot and fast as the chicken was already done, had to get the heat everywhere at once. Used a cookie sheet with a steel cooking rack, installed chicken to oven for 15 minutes.

Separate the veggies from the broth, reduce broth by 1/2, added a little salt. I could have used a thickener to bring it to a gravy, but there were quite a bit of veggies left, quite a bit. Dumped half the veggie supply in to the broth and used the motorboat to whiz everything to the consistency you see in the spoon above. While it did have more of a vegetable taste to it, there was plenty of broth and chicken fat to bring it around nicely.

I found with a little bit of work before and after can really offer up some great results. It was just me and Z for dinner, but nearly the entire bird was gone in 30 minutes, it was that good. I know what you’re thinking punk. “Oh Biggles, if I’m going to brown the meat or go to that much trouble at the end, I might as well just use the oven or stove-top.” I get that, I do. But you see, what you’re doing is breaking up all the work so you can go do something else for the rest of the day. And, if you’re late coming back, or forget to come home due to beers, it’s no big deal.
xo, Biggles

Here’s the post I was talking about yesterday, did this a week ago or more.
Been looking for a simple crock-pot recipe/method, something that didn’t require too much effort. I have learned though, that one really should take the extra few minutes to brown this and/or that, reduce a juice, do a little more than just dump, cook and pray. I did it.
I’m still in the experimentation stage, so headed out to find some stunt meat. Something inexpensive and easy to deal with, a pork butt. My local grocery had some mystery butt in a clingy net, perfect. For all the reasons stated above, and because it was portioned in to an equal log of meat. I could count on the same cooking time from end to end, non-confrontational.
My Crock-pot is a 5 quart rig.
Pork butt – 4 to 5 pounds
BBQ dry rub
Flour
Carrots – 4-5 peeled & sliced
Celery – 2-3 stalks peeled & sliced
Onion – 1 whole – mediumish
Garlic – Fresh as much as you like (4-6 cloves depending on size), smooshed – whole
Chicken broth – 1 cup
If you’re actually reading this for a tidbit of juicy goodness for procedure, there is at least one thing in there you might enjoy. See if you can find it.
Either bring the meat to near room temp or not, considering how long this sucker takes to cook it probably doesn’t matter. I didn’t and it came out perfect.
Install broth to crock pot and turn to high or low depending on how fast or slow you want this to go. Clean, prep and slice all your veggies (not the dry rub) and install to pot for the pre-heat process.
Get your cast iron pan hot with some oil in there, maybe 3 swirls around the pan. Pat the roast generously with the BBQ dry rub. Then, roll the sucker with flour. Shake a bit to get any excess off, but make sure the roast is covered in both. Install to pan and brown well, 6 minutes a side?

Install your butt to the crock and put the lid on, yer done.
8 some odd hours later, when your butt is soft and juicy, pull. Remove netting, using two forks shred the sucker, set aside. Strain the bits from the juice using a strainer of some ilk, use a fat strainer and get rid of the liquid fat (there’s enough already even for me) reduce juice by maybe 1/4 to 1/3. Combine everything together in the large stock pot you used to reduce. And here’s the tidbit I mentioned earlier, add more of your BBQ dry rub to the meat & juice slurry.
Here’s the scoop, it doesn’t matter if you’re smoking, grilling or roasting a large hunk of meat, getting your spicy flavors to the internal portions isn’t possible unless you’re injecting. I’ve tried injecting and it’s a pain in the butt, so to speak and doesn’t deliver the flavors I can get by adding a little of the dry rub later on. Try it.
Simmer a little more and you’re done. Do with it what you will.

With little effort, this will work with any cut of meat that lends itself to a long cooking time. Even the boys did a face plant in the meat and devoured it.
I bless this recipe and method,
The Good Reverend Doctor Biggles

That was really weird, never even considered it.
Last night I really wanted a casserole type meal. Something rich, creamy and full of gooey flavors that didn’t take too terribly long. I was far to lazy and tired to deal with assembling the standard way, along with the extended cooking times. This would be a staggering 45 minutes to an hour, this wasn’t going to do.

For the last week have been heavily using my Hello Kitty rice cooker to make rice & peas for dinner. Butter & chicken broth bring the flavors up so it’s a meal that I can deal with. Was sitting there last night thinking, “What if I use the rice cooker, as a cooker?” Everyone knows when you’re cooking rice, keep you paws off the lid so it can do its business. But what if I cooked a meal in it, opened the lid every 10 minutes to stir and add water or broth as needed?
I pretended I was making that casserole and added a cup of rice, knob of butter, can of cream of mushroom soup with a can and at least of water/broth along with some dumb ol’ frozen peas? Put it all together and hit the “on” button. Every 10 minutes or so I opened it up to stir and check on moisture content, wanted a certain juicy constancy. The automatic function turned off before it was done, so hit the “on” button again to jack the heat. While all this was going on I browned off a few sausages on the gas range.
Within about 25 minutes I had myself an excellent white trash meal and enjoyed it thoroughly. If you feel the need to thrash me for not eating locally produced, organic this and that, I don’t care. It got me through the evening and satiated my palate. And I have to say, if you’re doing College Food or Dorm Food, this can’t possibly go wrong. The Japanese rice cooker not only does rice well, but it can double as a faster than normal food cooker. 2 of these and a hot plate could do wonders, don’t pass it up as just a “rice cooker”.

Remember though, with that amount of salt infusion, copious amounts of liquid will be required.
xo, Biggles