Shepherd's Pie

First: the pies
Then: the incident.

When we moved to Toronto, J and I decided that we should try to cook from home as much as possible and this includes one night a week where each of us just makes something with no 'what're we going to eat?' 'I don't know, what do you want?'

The problem is that he's a carnivore and I'm a herbivore who has never cooked meat before. It's icky, and there are limits to what I'll do (I can't cut up raw meat or beat it with a hammer or anything) but I've always promised to be an easygoing vegetarian and not impose my diet on others so I want to be able to cook for him. Ground beef / chicken is the one thing I feel semi-comfortable with because I can see when it's done and I don't have to rub anything into it. J is also a very good cook so it's hard to present him with a meal that I know he could have made ten times better. Shepherd's pie is something that I felt pretty confident would go well and it's so basic and hearty that it's bound to be awesome no matter who makes it. So I made it.

I made two - one with fake meat and one with the real stuff. The framework for what I did came from For the Love of Cooking but I changed a lot. It was most useful for how to cook the beef.

I served it with gravy (beef for him, mushroom for me) and it was soooo delicious. And the best part is: there are leftovers!

Now.... I am a walking disaster. The pies came out fine, so of course something else had to happen. And it was a doozy.

Last night J decreed that the top shelf of the fridge would be for drinks only because it's too hard to shuffle things around when you're trying to get the milk from the back. A good decree. I had a mostly full can of beef broth and foolishly thought it counted as a drink, and put it on the top shelf. Mere moments later, I went to put the milk back and while holding a full glass of it in my other hand. I had to shuffle to get around the beef broth and it went flying, coating the entire fridge with beef fluid as well as the floor within a two foot radius. It's... it's all over everything. I mopped it up as best I could but I have a feeling that everything I eat for the next few weeks is going to taste strangely beefy....