"shepherd's pie" and potato cakes

I made far more parsnip and leek puree on Saturday than I really needed for the four of us. I hate to see food go to waste, and the idea of just sitting shoveling puree into my mouth for dinner one night wasn't much more appealing. What to do?

Buy some ground lamb. Cooked up with various seasonings and some onion and celery, and it becomes a nice filling for what we might loosely refer to as "shepherd's pie". Very loosely: the puree took the place of potatoes as my topping. It made for a quick reheatable dinner after swim practice tonight. Not too bad, alongside some Brussels sprouts. It will be my dinner again tomorrow and lunch on Wednesday.

It was a busy weekend in the kitchen, wasn't it? On top of all that, I also had to put together my contribution to the annual swim team banquet (photos to be posted another evening). I had signed up for a veggie side dish, but I ventured a little ways away from that and ended up with a tray of two-dozen potato and kalamata olive cakes. The recipe comes from Roger Hayot's cookbook, and it (along with some others, like the white chocolate chip cookies) is a reliable one. The cakes are fairly soft, in fact, and I had a smooth tomato and saffron sauce made to go with them. I think people enjoyed them.

The rest of this week, though, I'll mostly take a break from cooking, this despite the lovely gift of some cooking magazines and really neat looking cookbook of Swedish pastries that Conrad's sister Karen sent me. I will have to explore that latter one as we head into the crucial holiday baking season.