Guinness Stew

Ingredients of Darina Allen's Guinness Stew

• 1 bottle Guinness ( 12 fl ozs) I recommend the plain bottles not the so called draught in cans. You could use another brand of stout or porter.
  
• 2lb lean Stewing Beef
• 4 small or 2 large onions, coarsely chopped. Darina says large onions, I had small ones.
  
• 2 cups carrots, cut into cylinders. I mistakenly chopped 3 cups, but a good stew never refuses a carrot.
• 1 Large clove garlic. ( I replaced this with some chopped garlic from a jar and adobe spice that I thought would go well with Guinness)
• 2 tablespoons tomato puree,diluted in 4 tablespoons water
• 3 tablespoons oil
• 2 tablespoons flour
• some pepper freshly ground, pinch cayenne
• I also added some sliced peeled potatoes, not included in Darina's recipe since I like stews with potatoes.
• Sprig of Thyme ( I forgot about this )
  

Procedure


Cut meat into 2 inch cubes and trim fat and gristle. Mrs McKinion had already done this for me. Toss with 1 tablespoon oil, flour, some pepper, pinch cayenne in bowl

Heat 2 tablespoon oil in wide pan over high heat. Brown meat all over. Add onions, garlic and tomato puree, cover and cook 5 minutes.

Move contents to casserole. Pour some Guinness in frying pan and bring to boil and stir to grab the meat juices and bits on the pan. Pour on meat with remains of the stout. Add the carrots ( and in my case the potatoes) and the thyme. Stir and add salt according to taste. Cover and Gently Simmer for 2-3 hours, until the meat is tender, on top of stove or in a low oven at 300F. I used a crock pot on high for 5 hours. Check seasoning.

Darina recommends serving with potatoes of course; champ, colcannon or plain boiled. I have never prepared the first two, so they are on my to-do list.

Twitter is the id, while Facebook is the ego.

I wish I had written that ! I found it here.

The End began in the Eighties

Vivid and insightful account of the housing finance Boom from Michael Lewis.Read it all, he has a fine sense of the absurd. Here he is on Credit Default Swaps:

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short. “What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several times to me and said, ‘Short this market,’ ” Eisman says. “In my entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, ‘Short my market.’ ”

Interesting MIT class

Todays link is from Guntis, and features a class that has technology and business planning.

An MIT coursework assignment is to build an application for Google's Android phone:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20765/?nlid=1069

Irelande Douze Pointe

I'm sure the turkey haters will gleefully point out how poor this rehearsal is. Hat tip to Pat for this.

Cross of Neon

In a pithy comment EconoSpeak discovers that Obama needs more than a flag pin on his lapel.

I have just discovered the EconoSpeak blog, which has lucid posts on both arcane and familiar issues.

The FT has a related and depressing quote from a West Virginia Voter, Mr Simpson - "I hear that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist". This raises a number of interesting questions such as; Why not write 'Atheist' with a capital A, if is it is to be 'Muslim' or 'Christian'?.

Here is a link to the FT article mentioned - you may have to register and the link may be short lived.