Happy St Patricks Day!!!

Hello all!!! Christina here. 

So in theme of St Patrick's Day, I made an "Irish Stout Casserole". Well, let me clarify, I attempted to make the casserole and Trey fixed it... 

I found a recipe on Pinterest that I wanted to try. The ingredients are what you would expect 

                                      - Carrots

                                      - Onions

                                      - Garlic

                                      - Potatoes

                                      - Mushrooms

                                      - Butter

                                      - Guinness

                                      - Beef stock

                                      - Beef

                                      - Thyme

                                      - Salt & Pepper

I want to apologize, I did not follow the recipe as much as I just used it as inspiration. Where it went wrong was the length of time that I cooked it for. The beef chunks we got had a lot of marbling and connective tissue. I followed the cooking time on the recipe which was too short of time for the meat we purchased at the store. In my defense, I did not pick out the beef, Trey did. I think he deliberately sabotaged me.... Well, I learned something. When cooking beef that has a lot of marbling and connective tissue it is best to cook it long and slow. That gives the marbling and connective tissue to breakdown and the meat to get nice and tender, not chewy. 

I first did all my knife work. I chopped the carrots, onions, potato, mushroom and garlic.  Also we keep a compost so I put a side all of the scraps in a bowl to later transfer to the compost. Some times we also use it to make a vegetable stock. For example this recipe called for a beef stock, but instead I just house made vegetable stock Trey made earlier in the week.

Take your onions and garlic and place them in a hot pan with cooking oil. Cook until translucent. Then add your carrots and potatoes. Cook until starting to get tender, then add your mushrooms. In a separate pan brown your beef in butter salt and pepper and Worcestershire and Thyme. Brown on all four sides. De-glace  the pan with your stout. Combine all ingredients in one pan and add your vegetable stock and the rest of your stout. Cook on the stove on med-high for another 15 mins. 

I then put everything in a casserole dish to put in the oven. This step is totally not necessary. But it was a gift from our besties and it is so pretty! You can just put the lid on the pan you have everything in and put that into the oven. I also made some really simple herb dumplings to put on the top to be baked into the oven. 

Now this is where things went south for me. I put the oven on 350 and cooked for 45 more minutes. I should have put the oven on 250 and cooked for 2-3 hours. Lesson learned... Lets just say the first night we had this for dinner we were chewing A LOT! So Trey helped me and we put the casserole back into the oven that night and cooked it properly. HA HA HA.