Irish Deliciousness

Good mornin' folks! (I'll try not to shout for any of those with a headache...it is the day after St. Patty's Day after all, and you just never know...) We did our St. Patrick's Day very low key this year (well, most years we do actually), but last night we didn't even leave our house! My husband's heritage is Irish and Scottish, but he usually identifies himself more with the Irish side. I mean, he's got freckles everywhere, and his beard comes in pretty red-ish, so he does look a bit Irish, right?

Well, I guess you can't really tell in this picture, but this was us last night in our kitchen :)

So anyways, he loves all things Irish usually, and especially the food. When we go out of town, we try to find an Irish pub or something so that we can eat ourselves some Irish food, and we both always really enjoy it. So last week, I decided I would make something special, and treat him with our very own Irish meal, right in our own home! So I found this super easy recipe from Pinterest for traditional Bangers & Mash. It seemed easy enough, and I actually already had almost everything I needed in order to make this yummy recipe.

For those that don't know, "Bangers & Mash" is just sausage links and mashed potatoes. And then you make a thin brown gravy with onions to serve over both of them. Well good news ladies, my Irish experiment turned out so stinking delicious!! It was actually really easy to make, it made our house smell so good (hello sausage-smelling-house for the next day or so!), and it was so dang filling.

The only change we made to the recipe, was instead of using red wine for the gravy, I used one can of Guinness beer, because hello that's Irish too, and it was still really yummy. I think the red wine would have been just as good, but the hubs requested the Irish beer, so I went with that instead. Also, I think that might be one of the first times, if not the only time, that I've used all four burners at once in our new house - random fact, right?

So with the bangers & mash, we also had green peas, and Irish soda bread that I bought from Winn Dixie. I honestly don't know much about the bread (except that it has raisins in it, but it's not sweet), but it tasted really yummy sliced, toasted, and with a bit of butter smeared on top. I couldn't finish all of my food, so Jeff gets a tiny bit of bangers & mash for a repeat at lunch today.

Seriously guys, so good. I'll probably make it for us more often than just once a year for St. Patrick's Day, because it was just that good. And really, there's no special ingredients or expensive items, so overall, it's a pretty cheap meal. And that's certainly a selling point for us with our budget! So if you like sausage and mashed potatoes, we'd highly recommend you give this traditional Irish meal a try, because I really think you'll enjoy it!

Oh, and then after dinner, we watched Jeopardy and HIMYM as usual, but then Jeff found some list of good Irish movies, and we found one on Netflix that ended up being really good. So check out "Waking Ned Divine" on Netflix sometime, I think you'll enjoy that too :) And I'll just leave you with one more picture, because we have a ton of these cute little clovers all over our yard this spring!

Sunny Love,
Halie