The things we miss.

Before this dinner, I'd never had Shepard's pie before. But I couldn't resist the idea of beef and mushrooms and onions topped with mashed potatoes and blue cheese. I can't know empirically how this one compares with your mom or grandma or local tavern's Shepherd's pie...but I'm guessing it could stand up to anybody's. Check out the recipe here.

This masterpiece was paired with tomato and shrimp salad with horseradish dressing. Okay now, the ingredients for the shrimp and tomato salad are beefsteak tomatoes, shrimp, finely chopped celery, sour cream, juice of 1/2 lemon, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and prepared horseradish. What does that sound like to you? I'll give you another hint...

If you're still at a loss, I'm with you. I didn't get it either, but my sexy husband took one look at it and said, "Oh, shrimp cocktail as a salad!" Oh yeah! When I was making the dressing, I was thinking, "you know, this dressing has all of the ingredients of cocktail sauce minus the ketchup." And that's why it's served on shrimp WITH TOMATOES, you numb-skull. Geez.

Oh well. The salad was really good...and the shepherd's pie was really good...but they were definitely not better together than they were apart. The shrimp salad overpowered the shepherd's pie and left it kinda...well...washed out. If you're going to make these dishes (and I recommend that you do), I'd make them as separate meals. The shrimp salad would make a great salad meal in the summer when you don't want to use the stove or oven.