Luxury Shepherd's Pie

What we ate this weekend  - it was the second weekend of our odyssey through Jamie Oliver's Comfort Food, and so it was a shepherd's pie weekend. Jamie's version uses a slow roasted shoulder of lamb, so went out on saturday morning to our darling butchers to buy one of these. The butcher didn't have any on display so had to retrieve an entire lamb from the fridge, and listened to him hammering and sawing away to produce the required joint. I put it in the oven and went out for the day, leaving it to slow roast for five hours. On returning (after a few anxious phone calls to my son who was at home,

Jamie said eat with lots of condiments

to check up on it) I found the most beautifully cooked piece of lamb I had ever seen, seemed almost a waste to put it in the SP. Still, this is what I did, after stewing it with vegetables for another hour or so, and then baking the completed pie for another hour, it was 8pm before we had dinner. But it was a deliciously special thing. Jamie insists on making it a 3D pie, so there is mash lining the tin as well as on top, an all-surrounding mash, which does make a difference, and was extremely comforting.
             Our meal on sunday was a pea risotto using left over peas, and with a strange side dish of reheated SP, which went surprisingly well with it.