No animals were harmed in the making of this cottage pie!

So after much consideration I decided to make a go of veggie meat products. They are called Quorn over here after a name brand. So my first trial with textured vegetable protein was cottage pie. I have yet to try the finished project but I did taste the “meat” first after I was done sautéing it and then the whole base for the cottage pie to make sure I had the seasoning correctly. Did it taste exactly like my normal cottage pie? That is some what of a loaded question since while a few ingredients always make it into the pie the rest tend to be a clear out of whatever is in my vegetable drawer, last night was no exception. It is pretty safe to say if it was in my vegetable drawer yesterday afternoon it is probably not there tonight. This particular cottage pie had fresh chopped tomatoes, carrots, onions, orange bell peppers, frozen peas and because I only had 1 tin of tomatoes it got two tins of baked beans. So it did not taste like my normal cottage pie base even though I used two beef stock cubes but it tasted just lovely anyways. If one was to sit and ponder for long periods of time you could say that the texture was not exactly the same as mince. I think some of this was due to the fact that there were no cooking directions on the package of vegetable mince so I just kind of made it up when I was prepping the mince. It was close enough texture for government work. The most exciting part of my veggie cottage pie was that with the exception of the mince we already had all the ingredients. The veggie mince was a whopping £2 and I only used half. This yielded 1 smallish casserole size dish that will be our dinner tonight and 8 medium ramekin dishes that are probably 3 dinners for my husband and two for me. So for £1 output we have six dinners!

UPDATE: Cottage Pie was consumed last night to the delight of all those who tasted it (my husband and I). It was a big winner and veggie mince will be making repeat performances at the Y in E house hold.