Saint Patrick's Day Feast!

In honor of Saint Patrick's Day and as an excuse to make an Irish dish, I invite the guys over for dinner on Wednesday night for some Beef and Guinnness Stew. I took the recipe from Cooking Light (I know, healthy, right!) and adapted it a little.

The original recipe required roughly 3 hours of cooking time, starting with the browning of the beef, and then simmering with some ingredients, and then adding more stuff, and then some more cooking time. But hey, it's busy season and I quite frankly don't have time to stand around cooking for 3 hours on a week night. So instead, I did it in 8+ hours.

I got up a 5 am on Wednesday morning to get my stew in the crockpot before heading to the office. Although the recipe didn't say it, I am a student of Julia and I dried each piece of beef prior to browning it, and brown nicely it certainly did! Then I chopped and dropped the rest of the ingredients and threw it all in the crockpot. I realized as I was browning meat that there was no way it would all fit in one crockpot, even in the Resident Taste Tester's large one. So I split it all in half and we played dueling crockpots, which worked out very nicely.

My dueling crockpots, prior to cooking.

You can find the recipe from Cooking Light by clicking here. A few things to note though:

• I made mine in the crockpot by browning the meat and then throwing everything in on low for roughly 9ish hours.
• The recipe calls for both parsnip and turnip, but I could only find one at the grocery store and I can't remember which one it was. It was white, if that's any help. I bought about 5 or 6 red potatoes as a substitute and because the RTT loves potatoes.
• There are raisins in this stew. I know, crazy Irish. Raisins that have cooked for 8 hours are kinda like soggy grapes. I don't know that I would put them in again, put you should try it once anyways.
• FYI: If you're like me and you aren't an avid Guinness drinker, please be advised that they put something in the bottle, I guess to make it foam or something. If you're making this at 5 am and you aren't aware of this, it's ok. Don't panic. There's supposed to be something in there. And hey, it was 5 am and I didn't have my coffee yet. Don't judge me.