A Broken Pledge

Remember how I said I was going to follow the New York Times recipes to the letter?

 Um, not so much.  At least not today, St. Patrick's Day of all days, for a traditional Irish meal.

 This morning when I opened the NY Times Cooking app on my phone, there was a lovely looking recipe for Guinness Pie .  My oldest daughter had invited herself to dinner (in fairness, we usually have dinner at their house on Friday nights); I thought I'd invite my son and his family, too.  All this on account of us watching the 3 Grandsons at our house because Friday is not only Flip Flop Friday (cf: my Facebook page), it's also Grandpa Dan-o Child Care Day.  So that recipe was calling to me.

 During the day, I recalled our trip to Ireland almost 13 years ago.  
The first meal I had was a very yummy Guinness stew.  Actually, it was about the best meal I had the entire week we were in Ireland.  The Irish are know for their whiskey and beer, not their food.  So I checked the recipe and the filling portion of the pie sure sounded much like the Guinness stew I had.  I remember dipping my spoon into it and coming up with a luscious mound of mashed potatoes.

 So with apologies to the NY Times, I opted for cooking the stew and serving it over mashed potatoes as opposed to inserting it into a pie crust.  Plus, ps, I was not going to make the crust from scratch.  Gave this up a number of years ago.  Below are the ingredients before they became Guinness stew.

One note: in the forefront on a plate, beside the garlic, are two cubes of rosemary from last summer's garden frozen in olive oil.  I have been using these all fall, winter and now spring.  They are great!  I also froze basil leaves--quick blanched, dried, then laid them out on wax paper which I put into zip locks.  Those have not been quite as great but have used them in sauces and soups.  End of the season parsley went into a zip lock baggie.  I squeezed out all the air, then rolled the bag down so that the parsley became a frozen log.  I now cut off the ends, again using for sauces and soups.  This one has been better than I anticipated.

Happy to report that the dinner was met with rave reviews by all adults.  Small children, not so much, although my granddaughter Millie loved the mashed potatoes.  We're working on refining their little palates.  That's what Cooking the NY Times recipes might do for them.

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