Irish Stew? Not On This Site!
Irish Stew is made with tasty, tender lamb and is pretty darned good! But here's a recipe for traditional beef stew on this British-food web site made the good old English way, but in a slow-cooker. If you don't have an electric slow-cooker, then you have to do it the old-fashioned way by cooking it for the prescribed amount of time on very low heat at a slow simmer, constantly tending the pot and stirring it to insure the stew doesn't burn. (Now, if you absolutely must have a recipe for authentic Irish stew, click here for my "Ulster" stew recipe!)

Ingredients:

2 lbs. beef chuck or stew meat, cut into 1" cubes
¼ cup flour
4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. ground, black pepper
2 tsp. paprika (mild)
1 ½ cups beef broth (or water)
4 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bay leaf (whole)
4 carrots, sliced in ¼" pieces
3 potatoes, diced into ½" cubes
2 onions, finely chopped
2 ribs celery, sliced in ¼" pieces
1, 10-oz package frozen peas (optional, but very tasty)

Preparation:

Wash meat and place it in crock pot. Mix flour, salt, pepper and paprika - pour over meat and stir to coat meat thoroughly. Add remaining ingredients and stir to mix well. Cover and cook on low 10 to 12 hours (or on high 4 to 6 hours - be sure to monitor the level of liquid in the cooker, as you may need to add more as it cooks away over time on the high setting). Add the peas during the last two hours of cooking (or during the last hour if cooking on the high setting). Stir the stew thoroughly before serving (and don't forget to remove the bay leaf if it's still intact). Makes 4 to 6 servings (this recipe can be cut in half easily enough). Season with more salt and pepper to taste after serving.

This goes great with crusty bread and a pint (or two) of good, English ale like Boddingtons!

Hedgewig the hedgehog could just do with
a nice spot of tasty stew & a pint!

Notes:

The meat will shred apart nicely by the end of the cooking time. Coating it with the dry ingredients at the start is an Old-World method which serves to thicken the stew nicely as it cooks.

Tip:

The day before cooking the stew, I cut up all the vegetables (except the onion because cut onion stinks to high heaven), put them in an air-tight container with water just enough to cover them (to keep the cut potatoes fresh and prevent them from getting brown as they sit), and store them overnight in the fridge. I wash and cube the meat, wrap it up and stick it in the fridge overnight, too. I also measure out the dry ingredients, mix them well and put them aside in a separate container. That way, pretty much everything is ready to go and all I have to do the following morning is cut the onion, crush the garlic and measure out the Worcestershire sauce and broth before I put everything into the slow cooker for supper later in the evening!

Slow-cookers are a really nice, hands-off way of cooking things like this stew, but they can be a royal pain to clean up afterwards. I use slow-cooker liner bags made by the Reynolds company that seem to be readily available in most American super markets (usually in the same aisles as the foil and cling-film are sold). Lining the crockery of your slow-cooker with one of these bags before filling with your ingredients makes clean-up a cinch; you just pull out the bag, throw it away and wipe out the pot with a damp paper towel!

Queen Elizabeth I
1533 - 1603

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