Crock Pot Cooking Experiment

If you haven't read my profile, you may not know this. I am a crock pot queen. I love cooking with my crock pot mainly because I can make a dinner early in the day, the family gets a good dinner at dinner time when I am rushing out the door to go to work.

I found this recipe online yesterday for crock pot Shepherd's Pie. I can tell the author of it just kind of throws it together. Her details on the recipe were lacking at best. But here is my attempt. I'll walk you through it.

Here is my empty eight quart crock pot. Use nothing less. This recipe is huge.


Here is three pounds of ground beef and three pounds of "vegetables of my choice, fresh or frozen, doesn't matter". My greatest concern with this recipe is the author does not clarify if it needs to be precooked meat. I am assuming the eight hours in the crock pot will take care of that. But you can see, it's full with those things already.

Next, pour two cans of creamed corn over all of that.

Next, pull out your trusty Salad Shooter. I have had this contraption since the first year I was married, and I use it often. I don't know if they make them anymore, but I love mine! Break it out for this recipe. You need six cups of shredded potatoes.

You can see, I just shredded the potato right onto the pile. The author makes a very clear distinction here, make sure the potato touches all the edges. Kind of hard not too! My crock pot is bursting at the seams!

Cook on high for eight hours. Then cover with "cheese of your choice" and let melt.

In about eight hours, it will be time to post again. I'll give you the final picture then. More importantly, I'll tell you what the family thinks.

By the way, the vegetables I used were one 1 lb pound of frozen peas, frozen mixed vegetables, and frozen beans.



I want to break down how much it costs to make this recipe, mainly because life is a budget. If this is as good as I hope it is, I will have fed an army for very cheap.

The bags of vegetables were 87 cents a bag..
The meat was about $10.00.
The cans of cream corn were 92 cents a can.
The potatoes were a small portion of a bag of potatoes that was $1.98 for a ten pound bag.

If this turns out good, I will have made a yummy dinner with great leftovers for less than $15.00. We ordered pizza last night and spent $20.00 and had no leftovers. With Shepherd's Pie, I covered some pretty good food groups with vegetables and protein. We'll find out this evening.


*This recipe can be found at www.cdkitchen.com.*