Recipe - Big Red (UK) Shepherds Pie

Have you heard that title before?  I posted a recipe when we were at home that I'd seen in a tv advertisement.  It used a tin of Heinz Big Red tomato soup.  Well.... they don't have it here!  In fact they simply don't have plain condensed tomato soup, it's all cream of tomato and you use it just as it is in the tin.  When Mick was keen to start on dinner last night I couldn't think of what we could do with what we had left.  There was just a few bits and pieces of veg left but we did have a couple of beef steaks in the freezer.  I decided we'd have a go at re-working the shepherds pie recipe using a tin of soup.

This made enough for us to have 2 dinners for 2 of us, and some leftover on toast for a lunch. It was really good!

Ingredients
Tin of tomato soup
A couple of tablespoons of tomato paste (to try and compensate for the orange soup!)
A teaspoon of stock powder, or as they have here in England "Knorr's granules" (we only have chicken but beef would probably work even better)
2 sticks celery, diced
1 onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 teaspoon garlic from a jar
About 400g beef mince (Mick chopped the steaks up and whizzed them in our little food processor)
Mashed potato
Grated cheese

(You could also add frozen peas, beans, corn etc)

Method
Cook the onion, celery and carrot in a frypan until softened
Add the mince and stir until browned
Add the tin of tomato soup, tomato paste, the stock powder and maybe 1/4 - 1/2 cup of water (swish around the soup tin first!)
Bring to the boil and simmer, stirring occasionally, until it reduces down to the consistency of a pie filling
Spoon the mixture into a suitable dish
Top with mashed potato
Sprinkle with grated cheese
Bake in a moderate oven for about 15-20 minutes