Guinness Pie, a St. Patty's treat

Every year for St. Patrick's Day, as many Americans do, I make corned beef and cabbage while Len makes Irish soda bread. We love the meal, we love the leftovers. Then just a couple of weeks before St. Patty's Day 2013, I stumbled upon a recipe for Guinness stew pot pies.

Some traditions must be overturned.

It does make me wonder, though, just how much beef and potatoes we could stand to eat in a short time, because for future St. Patrick's days, I'm not sure how I'll decide between traditional corned beef and cabbage and traditional Guinness pie.

You'll have to go to Green Eggs & Spam's website for the recipe I used. (Must give credit where credit is due.) But here I will share my Guinness pie experience in photos.

My friend Robin often posts some great "here are your ingredients" images on her blog, so I thought I'd give an ingredients shot a shot... And yes, my garlic cloves are sprouting greens.

I've made this recipe twice now (immediately upon discovery and then again for St. Pat's), and I found it quite helpful to have my veggies chopped and broth measured before I started doing any cooking. You know, mise en place.

You might notice peeking out of the top right corner something else I always find handy to have "en place"—a receptacle for collecting compost. So it's chop, chop, chop, peel, peel, chop, chop, and then all the carrot peels and onion skins and bad spots on the potatoes are quickly swept away, leaving my cutting board and counter top clean and roomy and making for a quick and easy dump into the compost bin out back.

The first step, once the ingredients are all ready to go, so nice and organized like I'm on a cooking show or something, was flouring and browning the beef.

Then, simmering the potatoes, onion, and garlic in the beer.

Then adding the carrots and broth and simmering some more, before it all gets piled into a big dish with the beef to go into the oven for a couple of hours.

Our house smelled so good.

Crescent roll dough and four single-serve pie dishes, 30 minutes more in the oven...

Super delicious. I could have made six individual pies out of the stew, but we only have four of these cute pie dishes, so what remained was eaten later as simply stew.

That was my first time, when I tried the recipe out before committing to the new tradition. When I made it again two weeks later, I put a shepherd's pie twist on it, adding peas and decreasing the amount of potatoes in the stew itself and using fluffy mashed potatoes as the "crust."

Also pretty yummy.

On review, I prefer the original recipe's crescent roll crust. But, I liked the leftovers of the second version better -- stew mixed with mashed potatoes. Oh, baby.