International night – Ireland
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve updated this site, but I wanted to get caught back up with posting our international night recipes. When we started doing international night, I began with it on a Thursday night. That worked out pretty good for us until the week of Oct. 22. That Thursday night I had parent teacher conferences until 6:30 p.m., leaving no time to prepare an international meal after I got home. However, I came up with the solution to the problem by preparing Irish stew in the crock pot and serving it up to my bunch when I got home.
When I started researching Irish stew, I found that it’s one of those meals that everybody prepares to their own taste, but there are some common ingredients such as beef (or lamb), potatoes, carrots and onions. Stew is one of those great peasant meals that has become a comfort food staple for many people all over the world. I love a good stew, and the fact that Irish stew is traditionally served over another great comfort food, mashed potatoes, made it even more appealing to me.
I recipes that used just stew beef, beef mince (ground beef) and a combination of the two. I ended up going with one that had stew beef and meatballs made from ground beef. It was good, but I didn’t really get the point of going to the trouble of making meatballs, so I probably wouldn’t do that again.
A lot of recipes had Guinness beer added in, but after researching I discovered that traditionally Irish stew did not contain beer, so I left it out.
Here is the recipe for Irish stew that I used, but feel free to come up with your own version.
1 lb. beef stew meat
1 lb. ground beef
4 carrots, chopped
4 medium potatoes, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 T. dried thyme
1/2 T. dried parsley
1 bay leaf
1 qt. beef stock
3 c. water
salt and pepper to taste
mashed potatoes
Brown stew beef and form ground beef into meatballs and brown. Combine all ingredients except mashed potatoes in a crock pot and cook on high for 3 hours or low for 8 hours until vegetables are tender. Remove bay leaf before serving. Serve over mashed potatoes.
Tags: Beef, International, Meats, potatoes, Soups, Vegetables