Torta del Pastore

Here's a little fix of culture, food and frugal living tips for today!

One of the simplest ways to help with a frugal lifestyle is to use your leftover food as much as possible.  Makes sense, but there is a huge amount of food that is thrown out everyday because we don't practice this as much as we should.

Actually, one other alternative is to ensure you eat it all at the first meal, but that's probably not the healthiest attitude to have to solve the over-eating problems we have in the Western world!

Having just had a particular meal the previous day, it's not always appetising to have the exact same meal a second day in a row.  That's what happened with us last week after having a great dish of Spaghetti Bolognese.  Rather than having it again, we mixed it up a little by turning it into our Italian version of Shepherd's Pie - Torta del Pastore.

This is a really easy recipe, and can use whatever other foods you have around the house.  For our family, we added cooked carrots and peas to the reheated spaghetti sauce, and put that in the base of a casserole dish. Because you've used the rich spaghetti sauce as the base, you don't need to add gravy or flavourings of any sort.

Sauce with vegetables

Then we layered some mashed potato over the sauce, and added some grated cheese, which created the Shepherd's Pie.

Pie after potato and cheese has been added

 Into a hot oven, grill or broiler to melt the cheese, and you have a delicious, hearty and simple meal!

Half eaten pie, delicious!

We ended up with four serves from this dish, but you could add more vegetables or potato to bulk it up a bit more if you needed more servings.  A quick side salad gave a bit more variety to the meal too.