Bring your Turkey to the Cottage

It's almost Thanksgiving in Canada and as a great lover of turkey, I couldn't be happier. And to make things even better, a group of my friends decided to beat the holiday rush and have their Thanksgiving dinner a week early! Now I know there are a lot of different things you can do with turkey leftovers - like make sandwiches (yum), or turkey pasta (yum), or even just a simple reheat and eat (yums) - and all are goood ways to treat leftover turkey. But for me and my husband and our two-person household, there's only one future for leftover turkey: Turkey Pot Pie.

There is one catch to Turkey Pot Pie though which always makes me wonder if it's "worth it": the crust. I'm just no good with pastry! And by "no good" I mean too lazy. (If you've followed me since the beginning or even from a couple of years ago, you'll know that there are two things I dislike: zesting lemons and cutting cold butter into flour - a critical and necessary step in making pastry.) Thankfully, most local grocery stores sell puff pastry frozen; problem solved!

While getting things together to make the Turkey Pot Pie, I discovered that our half a bag of frozen veggies had gone missing. How they went missing, I don't know. My husband suspects we ate them; I don't remember using half a bag of frozen veggies in any meal I've made in the last little while so I can't be certain. Fortunately, I had a surplus of carrots from my carrot cupcakes, and we'd bought a bunch of celery for tuna sandwiches last week. We also had a handful (a handful exactly - my handful, to be even more precise - which isn't a lot of yield) of broccoli so I threw that in as well.

Now, a side note: I didn't want the carrots and celery sitting around in my fridge much longer (the carrots especially were getting soft) so I cut up everything and threw them into resealable freezer bags. It's the first time I've frozen my own veggies and maybe, for that reason, I think it's ingenious and fantastic.

Back to the Pot Pie. So last week, my Mother in Law gave me a bag of potatoes. I love potatoes. More than Turkey Pot Pie, quite honestly. I had intentions of taking those potatoes and turning them into mashed potatoes to top a Cottage Pie (which is a Shepherd's Pie made with ground beef instead of... lamb?) when it occurred to me that I could top my Turkey Pot Pie with mashed potatoes! And while some people might think that making mashed potatoes is much more labour intensive than running across the street and buying a box of frozen puff pastry, but I've practically got 10,000 hours of practice making mashed potatoes (that's an Outliers reference, in case anyone's wonder), and I need little more than a thought to want to make mashed potatoes.

When topping the Turkey Pie filling with the Mashed Potatoes, I was worried that it wouldn't hold because pot pie filling is much more liquidy than ground beef or lamb mixed with veggies. But all went well and after a quick fifteen minutes in the oven (you know, I'm not sure why I baked it since all the components were already cooked; habit, I suppose) we had TURKEY POT COTTAGE PIE! ... Cottage Turkey Pot Pie? Turkey Cottage Pot Pie? ...

Unfortunately, I'd only made enough mashed potatoes to cover the dinner portion of our Turkey Cottage Pie, so the mini ones had to be covered with cut slices of bread.

I think some of the greatest inventions and innovations are discovered when someone is too lazy to do something (haha) and our little Turkey Cottage Pie is just that. ... Hmm: I think my overly-diligent husband might not like that perspective so I'll offer another one: sometimes, good, great, and the best inventions and innovations are a clever and unusual combination of the things you love most - like Turkey, Pot Pie, and Mashed Potatoes.