Review: Jamie Oliver’s Comfort Food – Shepherds Pie

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I love a good cookery book.  In fact, one Cook in particular I find has a great style of presenting and way of writing books so that even a semi-ok cook like me wants to give them a go and gets decent results.  Jamie Oliver is just a treat for all of us family cooks who want to create something yummy without the need of 10 years at culinary school to make it good.

I was over the moon when I was asked to review Jamie Oliver’s new book Comfort Food as it was one of my wish list books for Christmas.

Opening the book, you are overwhelmed with the choice and variety of recipes and all of them were great classic family dishes – matching the name of the book perfectly.  After a good read, I selected the first recipe to try for family weekend dinner (when I had time to careful read and follow the recipe) would be Shepherds Pie.

Yet again, like the rest of Jamie Oliver books the recipes were written in a wonderful straight forward style and very easy to follow.  His way of keeping in mind that the best recipes work when they are simple but give amazing results is shown on every page with absolutely gorgeous looking sample pictures of each recipe.

The recipe called for slow cooking lamb in preparation, which I decided rather than to pop in the oven to use my slow cooker and leave the meat to cook till the afternoon from the morning – and it worked perfectly.  Beautifully simple recipe which allows you to use some basic vegetables like Swede, Carrots and Celery with some flour and the juices from the lamb cooking to make a delicious gravy and meat for the Pie filling.

Topped off with mashed potatoes, cheese and breadcrumbs – the end result was one that the whole family polished off!  I served it with some basic broccoli as I felt the pie was so filling without anything else really and everyone agreed.

Over the moon with this book, and one that I will be picking up a few copies for my friends and family as it will definately be a book you will use time and time again for family or just when you want great comfort food.

Shepherds Pie

In addition to the Shepherds Pie for dinner, I actually found that the quality of meat & gravy was a great amount for our little family of 3 people that I used some frozen Puff Pastry in the freezer to make 4 individual Lamb Steak Pies for another meal.

Disclaimer – Although I received my copy of the cook book free of charge for review purposes, the opinions represented here are entirely my own.

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