Apron Free Cooking ~ Irish Stew

By Noel Lizotte

We’re stay­ing with the Irish food theme at my house for a lit­tle bit longer. Most peo­ple seem to get their fill of Irish-ness all in one day, St. Patrick’s Day. But we stretch it out. That’s prob­a­bly due to the fact that my chil­dren enjoy cel­e­brat­ing that part of their heritage.

For our St. Patrick’s Day sup­per we had Irish Stew with our Soda Bread. The stew is def­i­nitely fill­ing and easy to make. In fact, the left­overs are mak­ing pretty good lunch box filler!

The recipe below calls for baby car­rots, but since my local gro­cer had “reg­u­lar” car­rots on sale, I picked up a pound of those and used them instead. I just cut them into two inch chunks and they cooked up nice and tender.

I love the con­ve­nience of baby car­rots, but since I’m watch­ing my bud­get, it made sense to buy the big bag. I saved some money and burned a cou­ple of calo­ries chop­ping. Not all that many calo­ries, because I just cut the car­rots into chunks, I prob­a­bly should have diced them into tiny bits if I wanted to turn this meal into an exer­cise pro­gram. Exer­cise was not the goal though, so I just reminded myself of the cost sav­ings and tossed the car­rot chunks into the pot.

The fact is they tasted good. That’s prob­a­bly more impor­tant than costs. I’ve learned that buy­ing some­thing because it’s on sale isn’t a sav­ings if the fam­ily won’t eat it. If you think about it, money spent on food that nobody eats is more waste­ful than spend­ing money on food that peo­ple enjoy.

Irish Beef Stew

1 pound beef, cut for stew

1 large Onion chopped

1 bag frozen mixed vegetables

2 large Pota­toes cut into chunks

1 enve­lope Brown Gravy Mix

1 bag Baby Carrots

Place all ingre­di­ents in crock pot. Sim­mer on low for 6–8 hours until car­rots, beef and pota­toes are tender.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Val­ues: Serv­ings 12. Amount Per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 337, Total Fat: 12g, Cho­les­terol: 34mg, Sodium: 2032mg, Total Carbs: 41g, Dietary Fiber: 5g, Pro­tein: 17g.

Make it a meal: Irish soda bread and but­ter make a good addi­tion to this meal. If you want to add some more veg­gies, add your favorite, but with the ones in the stew should be sufficient.

For the brown gravy, you may use the packet pow­der mix or canned vari­ety. If you want to raise the Irish quo­tient, instead of using water to mix up the gravy, replace it with Guin­ness. If you let that sim­mer awhile in the pot, the alco­holic con­tent will lose the kick and you’ll be left with the flavor.

I’ve inten­tion­ally dou­bled the recipe this year, and have sev­eral plas­tic lunch con­tain­ers sit­ting in the refrig­er­a­tor. We’re get­ting an extra round of Irish good eats by spread­ing the stew from St. Pat’s sup­per on into this week. I’m stretch­ing the bud­get just a lit­tle bit each day.

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinary.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Mar 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.