Irish Stew & George Clooney

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Yea, I'm a little late with this post, but what else is new. I had a completely insane work week, but still managed to squeeze in a little at home St. Patrick's celebration. First off, I bought myself a new Claddagh ring.

My old one snapped right in half about 2 months ago and after looking around, I found this one that I really liked.

St. Patrick's Day calls for some sort of Irish fare. I've been dying for a good pot of stew, so Irish stew it was. I used Robin Robertson's recipe in The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook as a guideline and although very tasty, it just wasn't all it could be.

I had to do something to up the flavour.

How about some Guinness?

In the stew? Hey, why not?

WOW! What a great idea! The broth took on such a rich flavour.

Have a sip? Don't mind if I do thanks. Cooking is mighty thirsty work.

So my recommendation for adding some oomph to your stew - a good ol' Irish stout. It's not a secret ingredient by any means. One of my customers, Brian (not Adams) is and Irishman and he says his mum always put it in her stew. He was making a big mess of colcannon but I skipped that because I had loads of spuds in my stew. Wanna see the finished product?

Voila! Look at the nice dark gravy. It was chock full of carrots, kale, mushrooms (which I picked out and gave to Jim) white beans and I added some veggie burger chunks to give it extra heartiness. I bought some nice potato-scallion bread to sop up the broth and we chowed down in fine style.

Jim had the camera and was taking pictures and this is what I find when I downloaded -

What the...? No matter how old they get, they are still little boys sometimes, aren't they?

I've said before that I have a sort of love-hate thing going on for PETA. Despite all the good they do, sometimes, they're just a little off the deep end. And, they are at it again. Did you hear the latest wacky idea? CloFu - George Clooney tofu.

Now, we'll all agree that he is one fine specimen, but would I want to eat tofu with his sweat taste in it? I'll just stick with my stew for now thank you.
(I can't believe they actually wrote him a letter about this. Cuckoo!!)