Fife Miner’s Stew

For bookclub this last weekend, I had picked 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith since I had thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Edinburgh as well as Scotland and wanted to read something based in that area. You may know him for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series which was made into an HBO show.

I obviously chose Scottish and English food for the theme. I knew that I was going to make my shortbread fingers as well as serve some ginger and whisky malt preserves that I had picked up in Marks & Spencer over some good soft cheese. But I needed an entrée. I searched for ideas and but only found haggis as the quintessential Scotch food.

First, I wasn’t confident that I would even find any haggis if I looked for it and it is a rather maligned food (though I found it evocative of Philadelphia’s scrapple.) I dug deeper and focused on googling "Scottish/Scotch entrée" and found Fife Miners’ Stew. Since Fife, the council area, is across the Forth from Edinburgh, I felt that I struck culinary gold with this beef stew and it would a good fit for dinner.

It was a success, bookclub ate it up. (Yes, the pun was intended.) Even Brian, who never thought that he has a parsnip before, thought that the stew was delicious. The house smelled so good after cooking the dish.  I enjoyed it so much - and it is the perfect cold winter day food - that I needed to make it again and soon. This time, however, I thought that I should adapt it for the slow cooker.

For bookclub, I cooked the stew following the UKTV recipe listing to a tee. However for today’s stew, I took the suggestion of adding sherry since the stew is reminiscent Bookbinder’s Snapper Soup and used an entire can of tomato purée.


Fife Miner’s Stew, based on the Fife Miners’ Stew recipe from UKTV network channel, Good Food.

The finished stew (non-slow cooker version)

Ingredients:
1 Tbsp. butter
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
2 Tbsp. plain flour, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper
2 to 2¼ lbs. stewing steak, diced
4 large carrots, peeled and sliced
4 large parsnips, peeled and sliced
1 small orange, zest only
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 6oz can tomato purée
1 cp. red wine
1½ cps beef stock
¼ cp cream sherry

Directions:
1.    Sauté the onion and garlic in butter until the onions are soft and translucent; place in the slow cooker.
2.    Shake the beef cubes in seasoned flour until well covered; add the beef and flour into the slow cooker, followed by the vegetables, orange peel, salt and pepper.
3.    Stir the purée into the stock to dissolve it; add the wine and stock to the slow cooker.
4.    Cook on Low for 8 hours.
5.    Stir in the sherry before serving.

My Daily Page (A New Year's Resolution)

It’s January again and it looks like we all survived the Mayan Prophesy.  So I figured that I would work on my resolutions for the upcoming year.  I have a mediocre track record with my resolutions, but it doesn’t stop me from making them every year.  While I will build upon some of the ones that I have made before – ranging from the inane (wearing sunglasses as often as possible) to the meaningful (going to the gym regularly), I’m adding one more to the list: writing a page a day.

I always wanted to be an author and have a book published that people want to read, but I haven’t really put “pen to paper” and written that book, yet.  So the goal of this resolution is to ask myself daily to type out a page. Hopefully it will be a page about the story I want to write into a novel, but if not, as long as it’s an exercise in getting myself to write habitually and daily, I will consider that a success.  

I simply open Microsoft Word to start a new document and I type out my words, my thoughts, my story or my tale onto the page until I hit a page break. For me this page averages somewhere between 500 and 800 words, depending on the density of my paragraphs, my use of dialogue or the inclusion of quotes.  I don’t have to stop when I get to the page break, I can continue on if I have the thoughts and the energy, especially when my story carries me along. Yet, I can’t stop my writing for the day until I get to that page break.  I can take recesses or work on the page in the middle of other tasks, but I can’t end my day without typing those 500 to 800 words.

It gives me freedom and structure. Maybe I can’t write about my story one day, so I can take a break and write about anything else.  However there are two caveats, I can’t use a blog entry to stand in for my exercise and I can’t rework something and have it take credit for writing my daily page.

As of this post, I haven’t worked on my sixth day’s entry, but I have written over five pages for my novel and one page for future use.  I’m embracing creativity by working it out each day. 

In the meantime, I’ll return to Around the World in a Pot and my other thematic blog posts.  Oh, yea, I resolve to post at least fifty times this year.

Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany.