Nutritious & Delicious Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie

Full disclosure before I dive in to this post… I started taking a photography class.

You would think that might mean my photos are improving right?

Ugh. Not so much.

Because I’m attempting to use all of the fancy dials and settings on the camera…which in the long run will make me better…right now …during my “learning curve”… it’s making it very tricky.

And I gotta tell ‘ya, I’m running short on patience most days trying to take the photos for my blog…

I just want to point and shoot. But I also want them to look good.

Since light plays a key role in taking your DSLR camera off the automatic setting and moving it to manual, the drab winter days around here are tough. (Can’t wait for spring so we can see the sun again, y’all!)

But I am determined to master this so hope you will bear with me.

Cooking Up a Healthy Version of Shepherd’s Pie

You probably don’t think “healthy” when you think of Shepherd’s Pie right?

I’m with ya!

I’ve been working on a version of one that is just so tasty I had to share it.

If you’ve visited my blog before you know I’m not a big fan of spending much time in the kitchen. Nothing complicated or involved is of any interest to me. But I have some health conditions that require a clean diet, so I’m working on creating my own healthy recipes.

This one combines two of my favorite Thanksgiving foods…sweet potatoes and turkey!

Ready to roll?

Sweet Potato Shepherd’s Pie Ingredients

Here’s what you need to round up:

One medium red bell pepper, chopped
One container of mushrooms, sliced
One cup of carrots, diced
Large clove of fresh garlic
One small white onion, chopped (I only use about a third of it)
Three large sweet potatoes
Kerrygold butter (it looks like this if you’ve never used it before)
Ground white turkey meat (this is the one I use)

Preparing Sweet Potato Shepherd’s Pie

This first step is what takes the longest…

Boiling those darn sweet potatoes.

I find it takes between 20 and 30 minutes.

You need to make sure they are soft and not crunchy. Another cooking lesson learned the hard way…pardon the pun!

While the sweet potatoes are boiling, it’s time to start chopping the veggies and browning the ground turkey.

I begin by chopping up all of the veggies… if you are a speedy chopper you could probably brown the turkey while you are chopping up the veggies. I can’t pull that off without burning up the ground turkey!

Next up for me is to swirl some Kerrygold butter around in a frying pan.

Just a bit of background on my using this kind of full fat, grass-fed butter…

I typically avoid anything with full fat. But a nutritionist I’ve been working with said this type of butter has the good Omegas. (Ditto for grass-fed ground beef.) I’m still on the fence and am getting different stories from different doctors and nutritionists I talk with about it all. For now, I’m giving it a try. And I use so little of it I doubt it makes much difference either way. We aren’t a butter-loving crew.

Ok… enough with the public service announcement…back to the recipe!

Once the butter has melted, I add the onion and press the garlic. Then add both to the melted butter in the frying pan.