You would think I would learn, but no, pretty much that doesn’t happen. I spent a crazy day in the kitchen on Saturday testing out several kinds of pumpkin pie recipes, so Sunday I just decided to take it easy in the afternoon and read. I lounged for too long and found myself scrambling at 7:30 trying to get homemade biscuits and hillbilly shepherd’s pie made all at once.

THANK GOD John stepped in and helped make the biscuits and do other prep work. He is an excellent chef and partner. The biscuits turned out very tasty. Good job honey!

On to the hillbilly shepherd’s pie. Tennessee rubbed off on me a bit and I got the wild hair to make vegetarian shepherd’s pie (and here’s the hillbilly part) and top it with cheesy grits instead of mashed potatoes. A traditional shepherd’s pie has a buttery mashed potato topping, and trust me there’s nothing wrong with that, I heart mashed potatoes. I just thought buttery, cheesy grits might be a good twist.

Hillbilly grits with a pad of butter- pre-baking

Post-baking

I made John some unfortunately lumpy mashed potatoes (sorry sweetie) since he doesn’t dig on grits. In the end the veg filling which used tempeh and a homemade mushroom gravy need more kick and spice in the gravy– so I’d judge it as only ok. The grits were good though. The whole thing was super rich and filling.

Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie with corn, mushroom gravy and tempeh

My plate.

We also had brown sugar carrots on the side– how can you not?

Mixing it all together!

We talked about our upcoming work week, the movie we saw on Friday night (Our Idiot Brother), Dr.Who, and my longing to study astronomy (I was told the math was too hard for me)  and John’s college class with Dr. Wolf.

For dessert, we taste tasted all of my new pie recipes: buttermilk pie, pumpkin buttermilk, cinnamon sugar top crust pumpkin pie, harvest moon pumpkin pie, and 2 different versions of spiced whiskey nut pumpkin pie (I tested those, not JY- teetotaler).

We both really enjoyed the buttermilk pumpkin pie which was a Steph original recipe I’m proud to say! But they all were good. Guess we were getting into the fall spirit (and thinking about a pie business!)