Our British Isles Weekend

Last weekend, we ended up taking an only-half-planned culinary (that will be debated later, as you’ll see) tour of the British Isles!  Come with us while we eat and drink around Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales!

Thursday, March 17

As everyone knows, we’re all Irish on St. Patty’s Day.  We didn’t actually have plans to celebrate St. Patty’s Day out; I telecommute on Wednesdays, and on the 16^th, I spent part of my lunch hour putting together an Irish feast for us to eat later that day.  While I worked from the kitchen table in the afternoon, I could smell our corned beef roasting away in the oven, later adding carrots, potatoes, and cabbage to it as well.  We initially thought we’d stay at home on the 17^th itself eating leftovers and keeping away from the madness. 

When I got home that day, however, I found Chris ready to go out.  He’d stumbled across the special St. Pat’s menu for Peoria Artisan Brewery, the new gastropub that’s only a few miles from our house.  When I reminded him of our plans to stay home, he countered with, “but they have shepherd’s pie!”  I was on board.  We headed over around 6:30, only to find that the shepherd’s pie was out (seriously, now, who runs out of shepherd’s pie on St. Patrick’s Day?  It’s not a normal item on their menu, but they literally didn’t have any more ground meat or potatoes?  Really, guys?  That’s the poorest of poor planning), but they still had their Matt’s Irish Stout on tap.  We settled with a pint of that and some of their other delicious food offerings, including chicken bites, a grilled romaine salad, and French fries.  Delicious!

We didn’t take any pictures, but to more than compensate for this, here’s a picture of our goddaughter Juliet wearing the sheep shirt Uncle Chris brought her from Ireland last year:

She’s four.

For those of you who are parents,

I suppose that explains whatever is happening here.

Friday, March 18

As it happened, the weekend after St. Patty’s Day was the Scottish Highland Games here in Phoenix this year.  We attended the opening ceremonies last year and had a great time, but when we ran across the Pipe Jam event this year, we chose to attend that instead.  The Pipe Jam was held at a Westin in Scottsdale, and in addition to a buffet of “Scottish” food and a Glenmorangie whisky tasting, our admission included watching solo pipers compete in an “anything goes” piping competition.

Chris, getting ready to jam!

The Glenmorangie offerings on hand

Smells like whisky to me!

The drinks were excellent, and the food was good, too.  It was served buffet-style and featured all sorts of things from fancied-up meat pies to cheese pairings to a few different desserts.  Overall, we enjoyed the food, although I have to admit the meat pie made me think the Westin a bunch of shepherd’s pie leftover from the day before, so they just repackaged it as an upscale meat pie.  Although I’ve certainly not eaten them all (a girl can dream), I’ve never had something called a “meat pie” that featured veggies and sauce inside it.  I’ve had Cornish pasties like that and shepherd’s pies like that, but not a meat pie.  I’m a purist, so my meat pies contain only meat, wrapped in a flaky crust and slathered with approximately 8000 gallons of HP sauce (HP sauce, I don’t know how to quit you!!!).  Anywhoo, the “meat pies” were delicious, despite my excessive use of finger quotes when describing them (maybe the Westin could have sent some of their leftover shepherd’s pies to Peoria Artisan.  Ooh, moderate burn!).

My meat pie and lamb slider.

With potatoes and Kiltlifter!

Cheeses with beet salad and olives

The entertainment for the evening was also excellent.  Five different pipers competed in the jam, and all of them were great.  I was hoping there would be more than five, but it seems like this is a new event that just needs to grow a bit more, so here’s hoping for the future.  Between piping sessions, the event also scheduled a lady country singer with an accompanying guitar player, a rock and roll/Celtic inspired pipe and drum quartet, and a comedian.  The musicians were all exceptional, and Tartanic, the quartet, had really great energy, getting the crowd involved and keeping everyone tapping along to their tunes.  The comedian wasn’t the greatest, but it seemed like he’d had some restrictions placed on him by the event itself, so we don’t think he was performing his own material; I’m sure he’d be pretty funny had he the freedom to do his normal routine.

One of the solo pipers;

I think the guy who took second place overall.

After the prizes, we stole a bit more cheese and then headed home, feeling fully Scottish (not that I ever feel less than fully Scottish.  I mean, really).

Saturday, March 19

In waking up on Saturday morning, it dawned on me that if we somehow ate something English and Welsh over the next two days, we’d have a full tour of the British Isles; a scheme was born.  Our plans for Saturday didn’t include eating out again (this was more eating out than we normally do already), but since we didn’t relish the idea of attempting to make fish and chips at home, we made the sacrifice (it was super hard, you guys).

That afternoon, we headed to Mesa to see our friends Tara and Ryan for a fundraising happy hour at their house.  Tara is on the Board of Directors for Girls on the Run, an awesome charity that stresses the importance of physical activity and confidence building amongst girls, and we were happy to be able to donate the beer for the afternoon event.  Since we take a major freeway from our house to theirs, we mapped out a few good stops for fish and chips, including Scottsdale Beer Company.  As the event wrapped up, we were happy they could join us in this adventure!

Chris with our plate of English food

Ryan and Tara!

We enjoyed our meal and brews, but more than that, we enjoyed spending time with the two of them and chatting about everything under the sun.  We bid them adieu and headed home to the munchkins.

Sunday, March 20

Alright, so Sunday left Wales.  I don’t think we have any Welsh restaurants around us and we don’t really know any Welsh food.  I am part Welsh (allegedly), so I felt we should still muster up “the old Welsh try” (don’t know if that’s a thing – probably not) and come up with something.  However, it needed to be at home and using what we had on hand, since I didn’t want to go back to the grocery store.  To the Google!

We’d heard of Welsh rarebit, which is essentially a glorified grilled cheese sandwich on toast with fancy sauce.  Or something.  We were also partial to making Welsh toast due to the prominence of it as part of a storyline on Archer last season:

“Come and eat your toast!”

Grilled cheese it was!  Due to only having three pieces of bread (two of them were heels – we were scrounging by this point, as it patently obvious), we went with open-faced sammys with a little bit of garlic salt on top to serve in the role of “fancy sauce.” 

Behold a photo journey for the ages:

Scintillating, non?

Feeling as though we’d let Wales down (oh, just a bit), we tried to think Welsh thoughts.  I told Chris a story about a Welsh accounting professor I had in college who was the most delightful man in the world; each class, he had a set of PowerPoint slides with accounting information and every now and then, up would come a picture of his (then – she’s probably in college herself now) baby granddaughter.  He’d pretend to get all flustered and in his lovely, lilting accent, he’d say, “oh my goodness!  How did that get in there?  Well, I guess we should admire it for a moment…okay, now back to accounting.”  I don’t remember his name, but he really was fantastic.

Chris, doing his part, thought about Catherine Zeta-Jones.  Life is hard sometimes, you guys.

Indeed

Later!

Amy