Stew

'Irish Stew in the name of the law,' as we used to say as kids.

I searched my own blog for the word stew and I hadn't mentioned it as often as I'd thought.
Kevin has made a lamb stew, which is fine, because we have reached a happy compromise where, because of artistic differences, I do the food shopping and he doesn't. Kevin's approach to food shopping is to motor straight to the items we need, put them in the trolley, be stressed by the experience, pay and get out. Mine is to swan around, looking at all the new things, talk to people, engage in camaraderie at the checkout and then pay and get out.

Every so often I acknowledge that this tends to lead to us not having food items that I dislike and thus will deliberately buy something that I know he likes and I don't. Hence the lamb. I can tolerate lamb only when I can't taste it, therefore when it is curried or spiced in some way that hides the essential lambiness of it.
And I don't like stew.
I have met several people here who see stew as comfort food. And in all fairness, I have eaten stew here that was very good.
But stew reminds me of school dinners. Lumps of unidentifiable meat quivering in bad, tepid gravy.
Stew was the worst school meal of all.

Somewhere in the grey zone between stew and the edible, was casserole. Casserole never seemed to have too much in the way of flavour, but on the plus side, the meat in casserole was invariably chicken, and not just something that 'tastes like chicken', no, actual chicken. Chicken fat is more acceptable than...larger meat's fat.

At some point in the culinary timeline of my life, French versions of casserole arrived, chicken chasseur, boeuf bourgignon, coq au vin, cassoulet. We had crossed the shores of edibility and landed on the beach of desirability.

I think the idea of actually paying for stew was a tough one to get my head round, but when we went to Ireland, Kevin was only too happy to order Irish stew served in a cottage loaf and pay good money for it, not only that, but he enjoyed it.

And this evening he enjoyed the lamb cooked in Guinness stew.
And I...enjoyed something else.