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Nutrition Snapshot
- About 30 grams of protein in one small ramekin, from turkey, cottage cheese, and milk.
- The mashed potato top is made with cottage cheese in place of most of the butter, which doubles the protein of the potatoes without changing how they taste.
- The trade-off: cottage cheese and broth make this a moderately salty dish. The card shows the amount, and the notes show how to lower it.
Ground turkey browned with onion and a pound of chopped mushrooms, then frozen peas and carrots, tomato paste, thyme, and low-sodium broth thickened into a gravy. The filling goes into six ramekins under a layer of mashed potatoes made with cottage cheese and milk, and the ramekins bake until the tops are golden. Each one is a complete small dinner that reheats in the microwave in two minutes.
Six ramekins are two dinners for tonight and four for the freezer, and a ramekin is a portion that gets finished.
Why This Shepherd’s Pie Is Great When Appetite Is Small After 65
Appetite falls with age. Most people past 65 eat less than they did at 45, and a large plate of anything is left half eaten. Protein needs do not fall; if anything they rise, because older muscle needs a bigger dose at each meal to rebuild.
So the arithmetic changes: with fewer bites in a meal, each bite has to carry more protein, and portion size stops being the thing to think about.
This dish is built for that arithmetic. A shepherd’s pie is already a good vehicle, because meat, gravy, and potato are eaten together in every spoonful, and this one carries more protein per spoonful than the usual version. The turkey and mushrooms are one layer of protein, and the potatoes are another, because they are mashed with cottage cheese instead of butter and cream.
A small ramekin ends up with about 30 grams, about what a full plate of the traditional version gives.
Soft Enough for Any Teeth
Everything in the ramekin is soft: browned ground meat, cooked-down mushrooms, peas, and mashed potatoes. There is nothing to cut and nothing hard to chew, which matters when chewing is the reason a meal goes unfinished. How to raise the protein in other everyday dishes the same way, and how much a day calls for after 65, is in Protein Density: Eating Enough When Appetite Is Small.
Cottage Cheese in the Potatoes
Cottage cheese blended smooth with a little milk and stirred into hot mashed potatoes disappears completely. The potatoes come out creamy and a little tangy, the way sour cream makes them, and a cup of cottage cheese across six ramekins adds about 4 grams of protein to each one.
Cook the potatoes the day before and mash them cold, and they also carry the resistant starch that cooked and cooled potatoes form, which is gentler on blood sugar.
Bake It in Six Ramekins
A single casserole dish looks like a lot of food to someone with a small appetite, and it is hard to reheat one portion from. Six ramekins solve both problems: each is a finished portion with its own crust, it goes from freezer to microwave in one piece, and there is no decision about how much to take.
Oven-safe soup bowls or a muffin tin lined with foil cups work if ramekins are not in the house.
Turkey and Mushroom Shepherd’s Pie
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender, 15 to 18 minutes. Drain well. Blend the cottage cheese and milk until smooth, then mash into the hot potatoes with the butter and 1/2 teaspoon salt.
- Heat the oven to 400 degrees F. In a large skillet, cook the onion and mushrooms in the oil over medium-high heat until the mushrooms have released their liquid and browned, about 10 minutes.
- Add the turkey and cook, breaking it up, until no pink remains, about 6 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and thyme.
- Stir the cornstarch into the broth and pour it in with the peas and carrots, pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Simmer until thickened into a gravy, about 4 minutes.
- Divide the filling among six 12-ounce ramekins. Spread the potatoes over the top and rough the surface with a fork.
- Bake 20 minutes, until the tops are golden and the filling bubbles at the edges. Cool 5 minutes. Refrigerate up to 4 days or freeze, covered, up to 2 months; reheat one ramekin in the microwave about 2 minutes from the refrigerator or 4 from frozen.
Nutrition
Notes
Tried this recipe?
Let us know how it was!Gluten Free
This shepherd’s pie is thickened with potato starch from the mash and a spoon of cornstarch rather than flour, and turkey, mushrooms, vegetables, potatoes, cottage cheese, and milk are naturally free of gluten. For people with celiac disease, check the broth for wheat or barley-derived flavorings, the cornstarch for a gluten-free label, and the cottage cheese for modified food starch.
People who avoid gluten by preference can use any brand.
Go deeper
- Protein Density: Eating Enough When Appetite Is Small (food.nutriscape.net)
- Aging Adults (nutriscape.net)
- Protein & Amino Acids (supplement-sciences)
