The classic Irish stew is made with lamb but we never see any at our Kroger store. Beef is good. Your basic beef stew – cubed beef browned in oil, take the meat out of the pan and cook chopped onions , add minced garlic, tomato paste, and deglaze with dark beer to give the Irish their due. Add back the beef, cover with beef stock and red wine if you want, add thyme and a bay leaf, and simmer for a couple of hours till the beef is fork tender. Add the veggies towards the end so they don’t get mushy. Good eating!
Recipes
Soup Pr0n
Cream of potato with cheese and ham.
Carrot Cake
I’m using the Allrecipes carrot pineapple cake recipe on this one. I couldn’t remember if I had reviewed the Paprika recipe manager app (that’s what is showing on the phone, there) so I looked into the archives and found that I had. When I did the review I had it on a tablet but it’s handier for us on a phone. Good use for your old retired phone! It’s free at the Google Play store. The free version limits you to 50 recipes, and you don’t get cloud sync. The paid app is $3. I spend a lot of time on my desktop so I have it on my Windows machine. They have it half price last I looked. ($14.99)
I’m using a new cake pan for the first time. It has ridges on the bottom and the sides taper out. It has some sort of coating on it. I can report the the cake fell right out of the pan when I inverted it onto a paper lined cutting board.
Mrs J is the official cake froster. She got started on that while I was burning some chopped walnuts under the toaster oven broiler. I turned my back on the nuts to stir a pot of soup and that was long enough to ruin the walnuts. I decided to toast some coconut instead.
Cookies
This is what I was going for the last time. Oatmeal cookies are much better when the oatmeal is not left out. I’ve been adding a quarter cup of peanut butter to the recipe and I think it works, adds just a touch of flavor but it doesn’t stand out. We subbed walnuts for the almonds. I thought I was buying hazelnuts when I bought the walnuts and was perplexed when Mrs J kept insisting that we didn’t have any hazelnuts,
Stir Fry
Chicken and veggies in a soy-less sauce. I almost never do a sauce sans soy but I did last night. Thickened chicken broth with lots of ginger and garlic and a touch of sambal for a wee bit of heat. I gave a nod toward sweet and sour with a spoon of sugar and a splash of rice vinegar.
Oven Baked Wings with Fries
I par-boiled these for 10 to 12 minutes and then dusted them with flour after they had air dried . Then it was 15 minutes in a 400 oven, turn, and another 10 minutes. Dipped in a pair of sauces they went back in for about another 15.
The darker sauce was honey and soy sauce in a sweet bbq sauce with garlic and ginger, the other sauce was honey, butter, hot sauce, and sweet chili sauce. The fries were air fried for 15 minutes at 350 and they could have stood more time or a higher temp but they worked OK.
Holiday Gifts: A Variety of Spritz Butter Cookies
In honor of National Cookie Day, my favorite Christmas cookie recipe:
I love spritz butter cookies. They’re tiny little, melt-in-your-mouth bites that go great with a cup of coffee. I didn’t realize how easy they were to make. It helped that a friend of a friend gifted me her all-metal, ratchet handled press. These are not easy to come by any more, at least not when I went looking. Most of the new ones are partially plastic and received tepid reviews, especially for durability and ease of use.
I love all the cute designs. Although my Christmas trees kind of look like trilobites, they taste great.
I have also upped the ante and made zesty butter cookies – one with lime zest and another with lemon zest and dust with citrus powdered sugar. Recipe here.
Spritz Cookies
- 1 cup butter, softened/room temp
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 3 egg yolks, room temp
- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Continue reading
Leftover Lover’s Lunch
Front and center is a quesadilla that is a leftover on a technicality. We had cheeseburgers for dinner the day before yesterday
and had a bit of ground beef thawed but not used for the burgers. The pizza we had a while back and froze the remainder. The glob to the left is that potato and ham casserole from last night. Still some of that left!
