Cookbooks 9 & 10: irish stew and chicken salad

As I'm going through cookbooks, I'm trying to mix up food types so I don't end up with all of one genre of cuisine at the end of the year.  So I decided to hit something from across the pond.

During the cold winter months, there is nothing like a good stew to both fill you up and keep you warm.  So the "Irish Stew"  recipe seemed like the perfect recipe to try from Irish Pub Cooking.

The recipe uses lamb meat. I'm not sure that I've ever used lamb in stew before.  It was a fairly simple recipe; toss the cubes of lamb in flour, salt and pepper and put into a dutch oven.  Add chopped onions, carrots and potatoes on top.  Throw in some thyme and then add some hot beef stock, put it in the oven for 2 1/2 hours.  Serve with some parsley on top.

The meat was really tender and the stew was solidly good.  There wasn't anything extraordinary about it, but it was so simple, that I would make it again. I didn't take any pictures, but I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like...don't think too hard or it will make you hungry!

Next for lunch, I tried a recipe from Salad for Dinner (I'm assuming that it okay to have it for lunch too).  "Chicken and Orange Salad with Shredded Beets" made good use of some produce still in season.  I cut the orange into supremes and then squeezed the juice from the membrane and tossed the shredded beets in that and a little lemon juice.  It made the beets really tender.  The beets and oranges were added to bed of baby arugula, along with some shredded chicken, thinly sliced red onion, crumbled goat cheese, walnuts and a simple vinaigrette.  It was a really amazing combination and pretty quick to assemble.  This will certainly go on my "make it again" list - for breakfast or dinner!